Inscribing memory, healing a nation: post-election violence and the search for truth and justice in Kenya Burning

Abstract

The violence in the wake of the Kenya general elections in December 2007 found one of its most profoundly haunting, provocative and creative expressions in a photographic text called Kenya Burning. This article renders a reading of photographs in Kenya Burning in an attempt to lay bare the complex sphere of multiple narratives that speak to the issues of what ails Kenya. We argue that as an artistic piece of work, the picture-text represents the ways in which the photographers as artists have constructed representations of the realities of Kenya's socio-political life around and up to the eruption of the post-election violence. In engaging with these pictures, we unveil the complex history of Kenya's multi-party politics and the burden of ignored or forgotten narratives. We navigate a terrain of sordid pictures capturing death, destruction and mayhem, pictures that attest to the truth that the memory of the collective populace cannot be “shut down” just for political expediency. The article's conclusion signals the ways in which versions and subversions around the pictures embrace a spirit of remembering and shared collective experience that speaks volumes to the place of the creative arts in confronting violence and building bridges between divergent communities in Eastern Africa.

Keywords:

• Kenya
• elections
• violence
• historical memory
• ethnicity
• multi-party politics

Acknowledgement

Joyce Nyairo is the Program Officer, Media and Civil Society at The Ford Foundation Office for Eastern Africa. The views expressed here are her own and do not represent The Ford Foundation's position.

Notes

1. Mboya and Ogana, Kenya Burning, 5.

2. Kenya Burning was first exhibited at the Godown Arts Center in Nairobi from April 19 to May 10 2008.

3. See the Popular Memory Group, Making Histories and Werbner, Memory and the Postcolony for a distinction between official or state discourses of remembrance and memorialization, and the memory work that emanates unsolicited from the general public.

4. For a discussion on the mediation process see Lindenmayer and Kaye, ‘A Choice for Peace?’

5. The four items on the roadmap to peace were listed as: “to undertake immediate action to stop violence and restore fundamental human rights and liberties; to take immediate measures to address the humanitarian crisis, promote reconciliation, healing and restoration; to overcome the political crisis; and to work on long term issues and solutions, such as land reform, poverty and inequity, unemployment (especially among the youth), consolidate national cohesion and unity, transparency and impunity” (Lindenmayer and Kaye, “A Choice for Peace?,” 17).

6. Walder, “The Necessity of Error” and Thelen, “Memory and American History” argue that the establishment of shared memories, this insistence on shared experiences in the past, works to bind communities in the present.

7. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” emphasizes that the task of revisiting the past is undertaken to serve expediencies in the present, and Moore, “Systematic Judicial and Extra-judicial Injustice,” underlines that even where actors project their work towards accountability that will be detected by future generations, the fact is that they see in the future work of memory, a relevance that determines present actions.

8. Nyairo, “Zilizopendwa,” 31.

9. Mboya and Ogana, Kenya Burning, 6–7.

10. The members of the ODM pentagon were: Raila Odinga, Musalia Mudavadi, William Ruto, Najib Balala, Joe Nyagah and Charity Ngilu.

11. See: Nyangira, “Ethnicity, Class and Politics”; Haugerud, The Culture of Politics; Throup and Hornsby, Multi-party Politics; Ajulu, “Kenya: One Step Forward, Three Steps Back”; Southall, “Re-forming the State?”; Klopp, “Pilfering the Public”; Klopp, “Can Moral Ethnicity Trump Political Tribalism?”; Kagwanja, “Politics of Marionettes”; Omolo, “Political Ethnicity.”

12. Lonsdale, “Kenya, Ethnicity, Tribe and State,” 268.

13. Mboya and Ogana, Kenya Burning, 150.

14. Mboya and Ogana, Kenya Burning, 151.

15. Etoke, “Writing the Woman's Body,” 41.

16. We are grateful to Prof. Kimani Njogu for this poignant observation.

17. Commision of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, “Waki Report,” chap. 11.

18. Gana and Harting, “Narrative Violence,” 1.

19. Appadurai, “Dead Certainty,” 225–47.

20. Samuel Siringi, “How Heroic Woman Died in Inferno,” Daily Nation, January 21, 2008, p. 3.

21. “The death toll for this horrific incident was 17 burned alive in the church, 11 dying in or on the way to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, and 54 others injured who were treated and discharged.” The Waki Report, 46.

22. On Thursday May 14, 2009, 38 bodies were buried at the church compound in a ceremony attended by President Kibaki and shunned by all ODM MPs.

23. The same must be asked of the victims of gunshot wounds in Kisumu; Kenya Burning, 116–17, posts this mystery of unidentified corpses at the mortuary in Kisumu beside a list of names and several referred to as “unknown male adult.”

24. Although several people were arrested for questioning and later a case filed in the Nakuru High Court – Criminal Case No. 34 of 2008, Republic v. Stephen Leting and three others – in which four people were charged with eight counts of murder, on April 30, 2009, the court found them innocent and freed them.

25. Kibiwott Koross, “Church Arson Victims Buried, at Last”; Daily Nation, May 15, 2009. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/598478/-/u69rta/-/index.html.

26. Kagwanja, “Globalising Ethnicity, Localising Citizenship,” 118.

27. See Gisemba's historical account and discounting of the argument that land was the reason behind the 2007/08 violence in “The Lie of the Land.”

28. Mboya and Ogana, Kenya Burning, 132–3.

29. Mboya and Ogana, Kenya Burning, 5.

30. Crane, “Writing the Individual.”

31. See also Kenya Burning, 75, “Angry Woman Ready with Stones, Kisumu.”

32. Crane, “Writing the Individual,” 1381.