One of the most irritating things about the violence that recently rocked Kenya, as every middle- and upper-class Nairobian will tell you, was the fact that many maids, guards and nannies did not show up for work for a whole week.
This was not because they were protesting against their inhuman working conditions or low salaries; it was because many of their shacks were gutted in the violence that followed the announcement of the election results — and some were actually living as refugees in various government facilities within the city. Others were trapped in slums that were cordoned off by militia or police.
Yet all I heard from my well-to-do friends, relatives and neighbours in the city was how awful it was to do the housework without help, what with all the children in the house during the holidays and the piles of clothes that needed washing.
Neither they nor I bore the brunt of the violence that rocked Nairobi’s slums and other parts of the country. We all live in neighbourhoods where killing your neighbours is not only considered bad manners but bad for business. We don’t look at one another through ethnic eyes, though we do sometimes wonder if the Kikuyu in Flat C11 bought a new Mercedes because he is corrupt or if the Luo woman in Flat A6 believes in witchcraft.
We decried the inhumanity of Nairobi’s wretched slum dwellers, who, we concluded, were tribalists who couldn’t see the big picture. Why, we wondered, couldn’t they remove their ethnic blinkers and see how their activities were affecting tourism and the Nairobi Stock Exchange? And why, for God’s sake, were they not reporting for work?
Foreign correspondents who transmitted the violence for all the world to see were quick to describe what was happening here as ethnic cleansing. Like my friends, relatives and neighbours, they were blind to the social, economic and political forces that were plunging Kenya into mayhem.
They failed to see that the main reason for the upheaval was not that one ethnic group wanted to forcibly take over the presidency from another ethnic group, but that Kenyans perceived the elections to be unfair and rigged. More importantly, they failed to realise that the root causes of the violence had more to do with Kenya’s economic and political reality than it did with ethnic chauvinism — although all three are linked, as I will explain.
Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Ten percent of the country’s 35 million people control 42% of the nation’s wealth, leaving nearly half the population to subsist below the poverty line. Inequalities within cities such as Nairobi are stark — residents of the capital’s ethnically diverse slums, rated as the biggest and most deprived slums in the world, service some of the wealthiest homes and neighbourhoods in Africa.
Inequality tends to manifest itself ethnically and regionally, with some ethnic groups and regions beneÂÂfiting more from public resources than others. Because the Constitution bestows enormous powers on the executive and because there are no constitutional provisions to ensure equitable distribution of the country’s resources, various presidents used their powers to accumulate ill-gotten wealth for themselves and their cronies (usually from their own ethnic group) and to allocate disproportionate public resources to projects and regions of their choice (usually to regions where their ethnic base is strongest).
Kenya’s struggle is more fundamentally linked to equity than to ethnicity, although wealth and poverty have developed distinctly ethnic tones.
More than anything else, the recent presidential poll was seen by the poor and the marginalised as the one that would address past injustices and regional inequalities. In essence the violence that erupted after the elections was a class war, one in which the impoverished masses took up arms against all those they thought represented the interests of the ruling class — in this case their Kikuyu neighbours, regardless of their political affiliation and despite the fact that neighbours were as dirt-poor as they were.
It is no wonder, then, that the most impoverished parts of the country witnessed some of the most violent clashes. What was most tragic about the post-election violence was that Kenya’s dispossessed, instead of uniting to demand justice and equity, turned on one another — as has often happened in history when there is an absence of leadership.
But as the country counts its human and economic losses there are glimmers of human solidarity to be found amid the embers. As one woman who lives in Nairobi’s Kawangware slum told me: “I know that when my child gets sick, I can’t call my MP to take him to hospital. I have to call my Luo or Kikuyu neighbours. In the end I have to rely on them to save my child.”
Rasna Warah, a columnist with Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, works as an editor for the United Nations. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations