The Politics of Home: Displacement and Resettlement in Postcolonial Kenya

Abstract

This article examines Operation Rudi Nyumbani (Operation Return Home), the resettlement of internally displaced persons (IDPs) following Kenya's 2007/8 post-election violence. In spite of the humanitarian nature of the operation, human rights monitors documented egregious abuses, most notably the use of force to close down camps. To address why the government was so intent upon immediate closure of camps, I examine the design and implementation of the operation in its historical context: placing Rudi Nyumbani at the intersection of trends involving land, ethnicity and class. I argue that protection of inequitable, colonial institutions – particularly institutions of land ownership – motivated the government to implement Rudi Nyumbani in the manner and the timing that it did. Existing literature analyses the role of Kenya's governing-elite in instigating violence, but stops short of examining its role in the humanitarian response. I seek to bridge the literature on humanitarianism with that on Kenyan politics.

Keywords:

• Kenya
• Operation Rudi Nyumbani
• internally displaced persons
• land ownership
• colonialism
• humanitarianism
• relief organisations
• class
• resettlement
• election violence

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Harvard University History Department for their generous funding. Further thanks to the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University, Professor Caroline Elkins, and Dr Catherine Picard. Most importantly, thank you to the Kenyans who were willing to inform her research.

Notes

Estimates for the number of IDPs ranged from 350,000 to 650,000 (KHRC 2009:13–4).

I refer to anyone displaced during the election violence as an IDP, including those who returned to their pre-displacement homes or resettled. This definition positions itself in stark contrast to that of the Kenyan government, which declared ORN to be the end of the IDP problem. Also of note, my definition of IDP is not exclusive; there are IDPs in Kenya as a result of prior election violence, drought, and cattle rustling.

In addition to the KHRC's report, mainstream media coverage of ORN deemed it a ‘failure’ on numerous occasions including: O Mathenge's 2008 article in the Daily Nation ‘Operation Rudi Nyumbani a flop, says rights agency’; The Daily Nation's (2008:2) ‘Refugee settlement drive has been a failure’; and the Sunday Nation's (2008) ‘Resettling Camp People “a Failure”’.

In navigating the ethical dilemmas of research among displaced populations, I used Guglielmo Verdirame and Barbara Harrell-Bond to guide my approach. In Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, Verdirame and Harrell-Bond describe the complex role of the researcher in the context of displacement. They write: ‘Refugees were usually more willing to give us information because it would also be used for their own benefit … such reciprocity was not only expedient; it also addressed some of the ethical issues of research with subjects who were victims of human rights abuses (see Wilson 1992) … From the point of view of “pure” social sciences, this might not be ideal, but was there any alternative?’ (Verdirame and Harell-Bond 2005:13). Like Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, I attempted to find a role that was partially reciprocal. Recognising the added biases, as well as the shortcomings of any compromise, I chose to act as a conduit for information, passing IDPs' messages along to NGOs and government officials.

Here it is important to differentiate between the Kenyan state that must answer to international pressure from peacekeepers and donors, thus presenting a nationalist front where land and ethnicity are irrelevant to one another, and the provincial and district-level officials who were more likely to galvanise voters and instigate violence through an ethnic understanding of the politics of land.

Prior to colonial rule, the Kikuyu were a chiefless society, governed instead by groups of elders (Lonsdale 2008a).

Mau Mau was a predominantly Kikuyu, anti-colonial, resistance movement fought for ‘ithaka na wiyathi’, the Kikuyu words for land and freedom. The uprising led to the Kenya Emergency in 1952, which lasted until 1960. The common narrative of Kenyan history largely credits Kikuyu freedom fighters of Mau Mau with the struggle for independence.

Until the 2010 constitutional referendum when Kenyans voted in favour of a new constitution, much of independent Kenya's constitution was directly inherited from the colonial period. There were efforts towards reform beginning in 1991.

This disparity increased during Mau Mau when the British detained much of the Kikuyu population. By independence, many Kikuyu who had been in detention were living in poverty while Loyalists, had secured land tenure in the reserves and were poised to invest in more land.

The success of the Kikuyu elite created what Amy Chua might call a ‘market-dominant minority’ (2003:6). As Chua defines it, market-dominant minorities are ‘ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them’. The Kikuyu are the largest ethnic group with around 22 per cent of the population; however, they are a minority in the Rift Valley, where many perceive them as outsiders.

During the 1960s, Moi and Kenyatta brokered a deal allowing for Kikuyu expansion into the southern Rift Valley in exchange for key government positions for Kalenjin, however by the time Moi came to power in the late seventies he no longer had to uphold the bargain, thus leading to his ethnic, political strategy in the eighties and nineties (Harneit-Sievers and Peters 2008:134).

On the first celebration of Kenyatta day, Kenya's independence day, Kenyatta told his country, ‘Let this be the day on which all of us commit ourselves to erase from our minds all the hatreds and the difficulties of those years which now belong to history. Let us agree that we shall never refer to the past’ (1964:2).

The 1998 Akiwumi commission confirmed that politicians were using ethnicity to galvanise constituents in an adverse manner (Human Rights Watch 2011:16). For further reading see Throup and Hornsby (1998) and Lonsdale (2008).

Violence surrounding the 1992 and 1997 elections led to a combined 1,500 fatalities and 500,000 displaced persons (Harneit-Sievers and Peters 2008:134).

Early coverage of Rudi Nyumbani, including the New York Times, hailed it as a humanitarian success story (Gettleman 2008).

As a part of the operation, the government offered transportation by lorry, and in some cases, fiscal compensation amounting to either 10,000 KSH (around US$120) or 25,000 KSH (around US$300) depending on whether one had been a landowner who had lost one's home. In addition to Rudi Nyumbani, the government supplemented the effort with Operation Ujirani Mwema (Good neighbourliness) and Operation Tujenge Pamoja (We build together).

Many of the IDPs whom I interviewed in self-help groups told me that they joined a land-buying group in hopes of accessing the extra 25,000 KSH.

The absence of humanitarian assistance for IDPs was a confluence of many additional factors ranging from the shifting attention towards an emerging drought in Northern Kenya and the crisis in Myanmar to international mistrust of the Kenyan government that prevented foreign governments such as the United States from contributing directly to the government of Kenya's Humanitarian Fund.

In addition to the effects of the crisis-recovery transition, the absence of humanitarian assistance for IDPs was a confluence of many factors ranging from the shifting attention towards an emerging drought in Northern Kenya and the crisis in Myanmar to international mistrust of the Kenyan government.

It is possible that some people were pretending to be IDPs in order to access the economic gains of humanitarian assistance, but unlikely that the problem of ‘fake’ IDPs existed to the extent that government officials suggested.

Mbembe explains ‘the human’ as waste as the relegation of a race, class or group of people to a fate of degradation and dehumanisation, as convenient and profitable to the dominant class. In the case of ORN, government actions led to the abandonment of IDPs with no regard for their human life.

As a part of the operation, the government offered transportation by lorry, and in some cases, fiscal compensation amounting to either 10,000 KSH (around US$120) or 25,000 KSH (around US$300) depending on whether one had been a landowner who had lost one's home. In addition to Rudi Nyumbani, the government supplemented the effort with Operation Ujirani Mwema (Good neighbourliness) and Operation Tujenge Pamoja (We build together). Many of the IDPs whom I interviewed in self-help groups told me that they joined a land-buying group in hopes of accessing an extra 25,000 KSH allotted to landowners.

In The Anti Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, James Ferguson discusses the concept of state intentionality writing, ‘it is necessary to demote intentionality – in both its “planning” and its “conspiracy” incarnations – and to insist that the structured discourse of planning and its corresponding field of knowledge are important, but only as part of a larger “machine”, an anonymous set of interrelations that only ends up having a kind of retrospective coherence (Ferguson 1994:275–6).