A New Project Brewing: Memory-work and Memorials in Kenya

As I've written about before, I just finished reading Elkins' Britain's Gulag.  It is such a hard book to read as it documents torture and death at the British camps implemented in the 1950s "Emergency" period when the British were exterminating Mau Mau sympathizers.  Also, as I've mentioned, it doesn't seen as though there are any memorials that commemorate this period in Kenyan history.  Both the construction and the smoothing over of history are active choices, worthy of investigation.  

In my masters work, I looked closely at the building of a memorial in Oregon, the Afghan-Iraqi Freedom Memorial.  (If you are wondering who Afghan-Iraqis are, then you'll have to read my masters thesis, which will probably leave you with more questions than answers.)  That memorial commemorates those fallen American soldiers with ties to Oregon who died in the Afghanistan and Iraq war theaters.  But importantly, the memorial was built in 2005, long before those conflicts were over.  (Are they over yet?)  In academic-ease, we might say that there is important "memory-work" that can occur after the end of an event and before its commemoration/memorialization.  This "work" usually takes the form of public discourse in the public sphere where a community works out a kind of consensus opinion on the meaning of the war/person/historical event.  Because sometimes this consensus is hard to achieve, you find that there are all sorts of conflicts over memorials.  Think, for example, about the recent hubub about the Eisenhower memorial that is currently being built (has been built?) on the Washington, DC mall.  Or more famously about the intense emotions stirred up when the Vietnam Memorial was being built.  Since the Afghan-Iraqi Freedom Memorial was built so early, it cut short this required period of memory work.  There was no consensus on the meaning of those wars sought.  

In my Oregon case, the advocates for the memorial, who were mostly a small coterie of fallen soldiers' parents, played on the veteran sympathies of the Governor and managed to bypass the usual rules for building memorials.  The final product was... um.... let's say.... strange.  Built in the memorial garden behind the veterans association building on the Oregon State Mall, the Afghan-Iraqi Freedom Memorial consists of a large (out of scale with the rest of the memorials in the garden) fountain.  It sprays water 20 feet up so that it cascades down over a large convex map of the world.  From North America, a 4 foot tall platform emerges, atop sits a larger-than-life bronze lifelike American soldier, reaching out towards the rest of the world.  Back when I last saw it in 2010 or so, it was showing considerable wear.  

Anyway, where were we?  It does seem that there is some important memory-work that must occur here in Kenya about the meaning of "the Emergency" and the implicit meaning of independence that came from it.  This is, after all, the Jubilee Year of Kenyan independence and a perfect time to get cracking on it.  I am in no position to comment as to whether this kind of memory-work has taken place.  But I do know that the official government policy since the days of Jomo Kenyatta, has been to obliterate the past and focus on the future.  That was an expedient policy in the 1960s and allowed Kenyatta to move forward without dealing with the nasty parts of historical reckoning.  It also allowed him to take advantage of the power structures that the British put in place, rather than reapportion political power.  And therefore, there are hardly any memorials on the landscape.  But there is something majorly lost and maybe even majorly perverse about repurposing a retired work camp into … something else.  It negates the horrendous situations that many Kenyans endured. 

There is definitely much more work to be done on this topic.  Perhaps a side project while I'm here in Nairobi.

Discovering Kenyan Artists

We’ve been so busy over the last month and a half getting our lives together plus working plus some travel plus the holidays that we haven’t had much time to dig into the local arts scene.  Thankfully some art was brought to us. 

On a street that we take often there has been an exhibition of a local artist named Michael Soi.  His work totally caught our eye and now I’m scouring the internet looking for other venues to see his paintings.  Check his work out here.

I love this one: Popcorn Love by Michael Soi

“Kuku” For Chicken

 

Mmmmm… does this ad on facebook look appetizing?  Makes you want to buy chicken, right?

 

Lesson Learned: Pay Electric Bill PRONTO

When the electricity turned off in our apartment this morning, I must admit, I barely even noticed.  It was a sunny morning, so the house didn't seem dark.  Using a laptop with plenty of battery meant that I just kept typing away.  When I attempted to go to wikipedia to look something up, I realized that the power and internet were out.  How long it had been that way, I'm not sure I could say.

I swung open the window in Jonah's room and asked the guard (the station is right there) what's the deal with the electricity?  He said: they are disconnecting people right now!

Egads!  

I threw on some proper clothing (as I was still in my bathrobe... it was the morning, no judgments) and rushed out to figure out what was going on.  As I raced down the stairs, I was pretty sure that the building manager had only handed us the bill on Sat (as we hurried out to schul).  Certainly, we weren't late, *yet*.

Sure, enough, the bill was due yesterday - that is, Sunday.  One day after receiving the darn thing.  And today, Monday morning, our electricity had been disconnected.  To fix this, I was told, I would need to go into town, pay a reconnection fee plus the bill in order to have power.  I pleaded with the guy who was weirdly wearing a white lab coat, as if disconnecting peoples' power was like brain surgery.  Please don’t do this to us.  I'll pay right now.  I'm new to town.  I have a small child.  I was trying to come up with any excuse at this point.

Apparently, my pathetic pleading worked.  I called Daniel who has MPESA set up on his phone.  He sent over money electronically to pay the bill.  He sent me the confirmation and in less than 20 minutes, we had electricity in the house.

We are the lucky ones.   I am told that the power company turns the electricity off in the slums too (wherever there is electricity.  Not all slums have it), with little or no notice and the electricians at the helm have far less sympathy for lifetime Nairobians who haven't paid their bills - regardless of how essential electricity may be.  The whole thing is a racket to get people to pay the reconnection fee.

I understand my privilege in this case.  I am white.  I had the money ready to pay.  I was working from home and therefore able to address the electrician directly.  Someone with fewer resources at their disposal would've been way worse off.

These are a few of my favorite things: Kenya and New Water Sources, that is

Yesterday was a big day for Kenya and its water budget.  As the NYTimes, NPR, and Kenya’s Daily Nation reported, there has been a big discovery of underground water, an aquifer, in Turkana County, located in the far north-west corner of Kenya.  The thing is massive, supposedly holding 207 bill cubic meters of water.  Considering the entire country uses about  ________ cubic meters per year, that’s one heckuva lot of water.  It seems that they were able to discover this aquifer through remote sensing, which is pretty cool, in and of itself, and then was only confirmed through some limited drilling.  Check out these awesome images care of RTI Exploration, the firm that did the remote sensing work.

And Turkana could really use it.  This is a very poor and very drought-prone region, rife with ethnic tensions.  So, yay!  Let’s crack open the bubbly, do a gig! Celebrate Good Times, Come ON!

And while I hate to be a Debbie Downer, I think a not-so-fast attitude is probably in order.  There are still LOTS of unanswered questions.

Here we go: 

Ownership:  Someone commissioned the remote sensing exploration in the first place.  And this kind of awesome imaging and interpretation doesn’t come cheap.  So who paid for the exploration?  And what does that entitle the person/group/country who did?

Governance: Someone is going to be given the go-ahead to distribute this valuable resource.  If an organization like USAID has a hand in it (which it likely already does) then there will be a strong push to have full-cost pricing involved and likely a fully privatized water utility at the helm.  Now, I don’t actually know whether a privatized corporation would be better or worse for the local folks, but it does seem clear to me that the poorest people in Kenya are in no condition to pay full-cost recovery pricing.  If they can’t pay, they may not be able to benefit from this resource at all.  Let’s hope that the governance regime is better thought out than that.  UPDATE:  I’ve now read that they are handing this resource over to the Rift Valley Water Services Board to manage.  I have no idea what this means in terms of pricing.

Ethnic Conflict:  As I mentioned before, this region of Kenya is home to a variety of ethnic groups and has seen its fair share of conflict.  The assumption made by lots of folks is that the presence of water will dampen those conflicts.  But I’m not really sure that this bears out in real life.  Think of some oil-rich locations, such as, say… Nigeria.  Michael Watts has made much of his career about explaining some of the ethnic clashes that are exacerbated by the oil industry.  I’m not sure where the assumption of reduced tensions with the presence of resources comes from, but it doesn’t necessarily hold water to me. 

Recharge Rate:  I saw that the aquifer might hold 207 bcm,  but underground resources like this in arid areas tend to recharge very slowly.  Like,  painfully slowly.  I read that this particular aquifer recharges at a rate of 3.4 bcm/y.  That’s cool.  Actually faster than I would have expected.  (It’s an estimate, of course, because deciding for certain how quickly water recharges is hard to predict and depends on annual rainfall and other climatic conditions that vary over time, etc, etc.)  But it means that you can only withdraw that amount each year without depleting the aquifer over time.  And what happens kiddies when you deplete an aquifer?  A whole host of negatives:  saline levels go up, pollution of all kinds become a problem, potential for sinkholes or other ground subsidence, crops that do grow now have to be irrigated instead of tapping into that ground source and last but not least the aquifer disappears over time.  So it’s a good idea to think about extraction sustainably.

Water Quality:  Just because water exists does not mean that it is certainly H2O in a pure sense.  In fact, that hardly exists on Earth.  Instead groundwater is often laden with metals, sometimes ones that are very hazardous to human health.  And even if the water quality is awesome today, it must be protected so it doesn’t suffer in the future and render the whole aquifer useless to human consumption.  One of the news outlets said something like they wanted to create a man-made lake on top of the aquifer.  This is just not a good idea.

Water-Energy Nexus Concerns:  This is a pet issue of mine, something I think about a lot, so please hear me out.  Water and energy (especially electricity) are intimately linked.  Water is used in the extraction of electricity resources (think hydrofracking) and water is used to generate other types of electricity (such as hydroelectric power).  Water cools power plants.  Electricity is frequently used to get water to where it needs to go (such as pumping it uphill to a place like Tucson or uphill in the case of Israel’s National Water Carrier) and electricity is also needed to get water out of the ground in all but the most artesian wells.  So when you think about water, it’s best to also think about electricity.  So, where is the energy to come from to get this water out of the ground.  Well, it just so happens that oil was recently discovered in Turkana County as well.  How about that?!  Case closed.   Well, not really.  I don’t know enough about the water and energy management in Kenya, but they are often in the hands of different utilities and sometimes even different ministries, oftentimes at odd or in competition with one another.  I just raise the specter of a water-energy conflict without knowing enough to say that there is one or not.\

 

Whew.  These are just open questions to me, many of which can be solved.  But the news hasn’t reported on these satisfactorily, so I’ll keep digging and let you know what I find.

Update: Reading Kenya's History

I asked Lydia if she knew of any places that commemorate Britain's camps where Mau Mau sympathizers were imprisoned.  Do any of the camps still exist as museums?  Or transformed into something else?  She said that the only place that remains (that she knows of) is Kapenguria, which is the location where Jomo Kenyatta and five other Mau Mau leaders were imprisoned at the outset of The Emergency.  They were known as the Kapenguria Six.  (It's far away, but I am curious enough to want to see it.)

If the name Kenyatta rings a bell, well it should.  Jomo Kenyatta became the first president of Kenya and his son Uhuru Kenyatta is the current president.  Neither one is known for a stellar human rights record.

Interestingly, in the epilogue to Elkins' book, she reports on a meeting between Jomo Kenyatta (after he had ascended to the presidency of Kenya) and Evelyn Baring who had been the chief British official in Kenya during the Emergency and was directly responsible for the imprisonment of Kenyatta.  I have to quote directly from Elkins because it is so.... so... terribly classic.

There was no avoiding the subject, so after some initial pleasantries the former jailer turned to his onetime captive, gestured, and said, "By the way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order twenty years ago."  "I know," Kenyatta told him.  "If I had been in your shoes at the time I would have done exactly the same."  The nervousness evaporated, and the room erupted in relieved laughter.  With everyone still chuckling, the new president chimed in, "And I myself signed a number of detention orders sitting right there too" (354-355).

Nothing is black and white.  I have a whole series of critiques of the Elkins book (including her lack of nuance), which I will save for another post, but neither the Mau Mau leadership, nor the British colonial authorities come out as heroes.  Revolutions are ugly but sometimes necessary.

Reading Kenyan History… (slowly by slowly)

When I arrived in Kenya, I knew shamefully little about Kenyan history, politics, geography, and culture.  Bad geographer, bad geographer!  (Notice one hand slapping the other.)  And now, after living here for five weeks, I know just a tiny smidge more than shamefully little.  Since I am absolutely powerless to the pull of the purchase in bookstores, I found myself at the BookStop in Yaya Center chatting with the owner about which history I should read.  He lifted a tome called Kenya: A History that he insisted was obligatory reading.  But I demurred: let me dip my toe into Kenyan history with something a bit…. uh… smaller?  Never fear, I didn’t leave the shop empty-handed.  I picked up the Pulitzer Prize winning history by Caroline Elkins that details the brutal period at the end of British reign in Kenya, titled Britain’s Gulag.

Let me start by telling you that I don’t read Holocaust books and I don’t watch Holocaust movies.  I just don’t go there.  My grandparents were German refugees and I can’t handle it.  I don’t feel like a better person watching humans do terrible things to other humans, in the context of the Holocaust or any other situation.  I also don’t want that era in my family’s history to define me.  So, by my own choice, it has been a long time since I read anything as horrifying as Elkins’ book. 

Elkins’ main premise is that this period, called “The Emergency,” (1952-ish to 1963) when the British were routing out Mau Mau oathtakers from the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya, was as systematic, as horrifying, and as violent as any terrible genocide the world has known.  Responding to the Mau Mau uprising, the British developed a “pipeline” of camps wherein men and women with Mau Mau sympathies (or those who simply didn’t side with the British, there could be no middle ground) would be detained, robbed, questioned, shamed, tortured in every gruesome way, killed, raped, and exposed to extreme famine, disease, and unsanitary conditions.  If these Mau Mau detainees renounced their oath, they might be transferred to less-strict camps.  If they stayed committed to Mau Mau or increased their devotion, they would be transferred up the pipeline to harder camps.  (It wasn’t as simple as renouncing an oath, however.  If an individual did renounce to save him or herself, he or she might face death from Mau Mau compatriots.  It was basically a lose-lose for a suspected Mau Mau person.)  Even when people were “released,” it was into Kikuyu reserves where their land had been confiscated and enforced hard labor was required.  Basically, at times it resembled the camp system that the Nazis developed, against which the British had just fought a major war.  Then the Brits turned around and instituted a similar kind of camp system in Kenya.  (There is also mention of a camp system in Malaya, but I know even less about that.)  Needless to say, this has been a hard and yet necessary book to read. 

I think Elkins is responding to a general sentiment that the British weren’t that bad in Kenya.  I mean, they weren’t as despicable leaders as the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge.  And hey, maybe Kenya is even better off than other post-colonial places because of the legacy of British rule.  But this book basically says: let’s put any of these cutsie British ideas aside once and for all.  The British were brutal colonial leaders, as brutal, as vicious, as any of ‘em out there, willing to stop at nothing to hold on to their colonial territory. 

Well, we all know how that turned out.  The Brits lost Kenya. 

Nerd Geographer Alert:  The weird thing is, I have yet to see anything on the landscape that commemorates these Mau Mau fighters who suffered mightily at the hands of the British.  For example, we live right near Dagoretti Corner.  And in the book, there is a significant camp at Dagoretti.  I tried to find out where the camp actually was.  Is there any remnant?  Is there anything marking the place with its historical significance?  Not that I’ve seen.

The first time I experienced this kind of landscape commemoration absence was in China.  It was 1998 and I had gone to China with a friend as a post-high school graduation trip.  I knew desperately little about China, basically had only seen the footage of “tank man” at Tiananmen Square.  In fact, I think that protest might be my first political memory.  So when we got to Tiananmen Square and there was NOTHING to memorialize the people who died in the 1989 protests (and then my Chinese government tour guide had the gall to say that no one died in 1989 in the square… which I found out later, actually may be technically true because everyone who died was just outside the square), I was just stunned.  The whole square just vibrated to me with the absence of voices.  The place had meaning to me, but it was paved over, covered up, and negated rather than addressed.  I had to get outta there.

I wonder how many places here, in Kenya, memorialize the British brutality.  I’ve looked around to find any traces, but haven’t found them yet.  Anyone who knows something more about this.. I’m all ears.  Did the British destroy the physical camps, like they set fire to so many of the records that chronicle their maniacal control over Kenya?  I haven’t quite finished Elkins’ book, but I hope she tells me.

As my mom repeats, moving to Kenya has sure stretched my understanding of the world in new and unpredictable ways.  This is surely just the beginning.