A catchy ”song for peace” crackling over Kenyan radio is breaking pace with the litany of doom and gloom and bloody fallout from last month’s elections that dominates the air waves these days.
WaKenya Pamoja (Kenya Together) carries a different message, and maybe a reason not to give up on a vote meant to uphold this nation as a beacon of democracy in a troubled region.
”It’s a cry to Kenya, to let the people get back together,” says gospel music producer Robert Kamanzi, who wrote both the music and lyrics.
In the same vein as Bob Geldof’s charity supergroup Band Aid, three dozen musicians from this East African state recorded the song only days after rioting broke out following the presidential poll on December 27.
It mixes hip-hop, reggae and other styles, in a musical metaphor for the unity it aims to inspire to help heal raw ethnic divisions revealed by the recent violence.
”It questions why the great people of Kenya are fighting each other; it asks why a people once together are shedding the blood of women, children and the elderly,” Kamanzi says, translating some of the lyrics, which are sung in Swahili.
”The reaction has been amazing and one DJ in a radio station said he played it over 20 times with tears in his eyes,” he adds.
The song is part of a wider movement of alternative opposition that has sprung up in response to a strict ban on street protests.
The United States-based rights group Human Rights Watch accused police of using ”excessive, lethal force against public rallies” when the opposition — led by Raila Odinga, who claims he was robbed of victory in the presidential poll that reinstated Mwai Kibaki — tried to stage demonstrations last week.
Plans for more rallies this week have sparked fears of further violence.
Already, about 700 people have died in the post-election clashes, mainly in western Kenya and Nairobi’s slums, and at least a quarter of a million people been displaced — while rival politicians remain at loggerheads.
New protests
Even more than the disputed election itself, many Kenyans are angrier about the brutal street violence triggered by the political arguments, and are now seeking new ways to protest.
Among them, Binyavanga Wainaina, a leading Kenyan writer and Mail & Guardian columnist, is working to publicise a ”non-political picture” of the situation through articles posted on websites, as well as in both domestic and international media. He is one of more than 30 members of the Concerned Writers for Peace organisation.
”We are trying to clarify and to humanise the situation,” Wainaina says. ”We don’t know where things are going to go, but what we can do is document what is happening.”
Several websites have also sprung up, some offering opinion, others logging and documenting violence, others mobilising fund-raising and support for the thousands forced from their homes.
”We cannot gather together in direct action, given the behaviour of the police. So we have had to come up with ingenious ways to mobilise people instead,” says Shailja Patel, a poet and founding member of an umbrella group of human rights and legal organisations called Kenyans for Peace, Truth, Justice.
Patel says her planned protest of shaving her hair in a Nairobi park — in a ”symbol of collective mourning” — was barred by police. Now she plans to post a video of her cutting her hair online.
With the worst-hit areas of recent clashes lying in Kenya’s poor and sprawling slums, such efforts may seem mere symbolic gestures of little consequence. Writer Wainaina, however, defends the initiatives.
”I don’t think either Kibaki or Raila have the answer,” he says. ”But it is the right of artists to hold the soul of the nation together, to see the truth from all sides and document the things that others might dare not to say. They write texts that dream of the possibilities of the future.”
Music producer Kamanzi, who has witnessed conflict both in his birthplace of Burundi, then again in Rwanda, expresses hope that the efforts could do some good.
”I have seen and know war, but there wasn’t the opportunity to do something like this then,” he says. ”But the Kenyan people want peace, and this helps to bring those voices together.” — AFP
