TEBlog

Some people do funny things when they’re stressed. When we heard that Marakwet militia were attacking homes just a kilometre away, Min Ouma (mother of Ouma) decided to take a bath. We found stress relief in laughing hysterically about it later that night over a candlelit dinner, but apparently, when stress exceeds the individual’s ability to cope, it results in a series of dysfunctional physical and mental responses. That afternoon, Josh (my husband) and his two older brothers came striding up towards the large ornamental Nandi flame (aka African tulip) tree conveniently positioned on the kitchen side of their sprawling farmhouse, about 400km from Nairobi in Cherangan’yi, rural northwest Kenya, near Kitale. He hardly ever shouts but I knew something was amiss when he yelled out to me from a distance, “Pack your stuff. Women and children are leaving now!” I calmly retrieved our two year old son, Morné, from his play among the chickens (even being pecked by the mother hen didn’t weaken his resolve to try to catch a chick), and tossed our stuff into two backpacks, only deliberating for a moment to consider whether or not I should carry the spade handle and stick I had slept with the night before, when gunshots had rung out in the night, and the acrid smell of burning homes was even more acute than the glow of flames on the horizon.

Local Marakwet troops were attacking, looting and burning homesteads in the area, flushing out kisiis and kikuyus or perceived PNU sympathisers. But rumour had it that they weren’t stopping long enough to ask any questions about one’s political convictions and were indiscriminately attacking and burning. A band of 300 men was allegedly just a few kilometres away, armed with guns (courtesy of the home guard system), and they were coming our way. The home guards were created and armed by government (from colonial days) to protect livestock from attack or theft, particularly in remote areas. My husband and his brothers weren’t taking any chances, and women and children (generally the most vulnerable groups during times of war) were bundled off.

Quite honestly, I didn’t really stop long enough to think about the long standing chauvinistic tradition of sending the women to “safety” and leaving the men (6 of them in total, together with the workers), armed with a ragged assortment of knobkerries and 1 blunt panga that had obviously seen better days, to bravely fight off this alleged army. Obviously my mother in law, Dr Penninah Ogada had a bit more presence of mind than I did, because she insisted on staying to protect the home, delaying our flight by first brewing a pot of Rooibos tea for Morné and packing incredible amounts of drinking water, until her eldest son had to almost physically lead her out of the door and into the car. We drove in convoy to Kachibora, about 10 minutes away, hoping that the police station there would offer some security, and joined what seemed like hundreds of people on the side of the road to wait endlessly for news from the homestead. Morné and his cousins played in the sand with matchbox cars and miniature dinosaurs, and I watched the steady stream of people flow by, many with just one small suitcase, entire families, children carrying children, some leading livestock, but all with the same desperate fear in their eyes.

 Thankfully my husband and brothers in law didn’t engage in battle that day, though later that week, just hours after our departure, the farm workers fended off an attempted raid. It was really from that moment that I knew ordinary Kenyans were not going to quietly accept what seemed like blatant rigging of the elections in favour of current President Mwai Kibaki. We’d been following election news avidly, listening interchangeably to local FM broadcasts on an old A-track machine and the windup radio, and the BBC on shortwave. On our very first day in Kenya, the customs official at the airport engaged my husband in a discussion about the elections and her need to “vote for change” (i.e. for opposition presidential candidate Raila Odinga). A markedly politicised nation, ordinary people everywhere were talking about the upcoming election, often pulling out their voter’s cards to show us, and always saying that it was time for change in the form of a new president. Apathy appears to be alien to Kenyans and many walked for kilometres to attend opposition Orange Democratic Party (ODM) rallies in the city centre. Our sight-seeing in Nairobi had to be redirected many times to avoid the sea of orange bodies blocking the roads – the colour of presidential challenger, Raila and his ODM.

The Ogada family rose at 5.30am on Dec 27th to vote at a local school, but 2 days later everyone seemed uncertain as to whether they should celebrate when we heard the news broadcasts that Raila Odinga of ODM (Orange Democratic Movement) was the leading candidate in 6 out of 8 provinces. Their unspoken unease seemed warranted when Kibaki was later sworn in as president with strange discrepancies between the numbers of ballots and numbers of voters, as well as between numbers announced by the electoral commission and those later broadcast in the media. Allegedly, Raila himself arrived to vote to find that his name was not printed on the ballot paper, one of the many irregularities that plagued the election. We had a hint of what was to come when travelling through Eldoret on our way to Cherang’anyi, we narrowly escaped being stoned by a mob, who seemed to determined to check the trunk of our car for pre-filled ballot papers, apparently common practice. Days later Eldoret turned into a war zone with constant clashes between members of the Kalenjin tribe, which backed Odinga, and the Kikuyus who voted for Kibaki.

Huddled over the shortwave receiver to catch news from BBC and RFI that night, we received an SMS informing of Raila’s arrest for treason (In 1982, he was also arrested after being accused of plotting a coup against President Daniel arap Moi and spent eight years in prison). A local news blackout and ban on live broadcasts meant that all the local FM stations were broadcasting music only, some occasionally pausing to read what sounded like government issued propagandistic press releases. Interestingly enough, this did not stop the informal network of news via SMS, a trend that had begun long before (and continued beyond) Election Day. News alerts (and sometimes political propaganda, usually pro ODM) would arrive to one’s cellphone, and the user would forward the message to all their contacts.

The next morning we left the farm under the cover of darkness at 4am, valuables under the seat, and Morné’s side of the window taped to prevent shattered glass in the event of a stoning. We travelled with a mzee (elder) guide, who being Marakwet, led us through the Marakwet territories of Kapcherop and Kapsowar up bumpy donkey tracks through the mountains and down into the valley to the town of Iten, a tortuous 4 hour detour from the route originally planned. “Follow closely”, he said tensely to our convoy of three cars, carrying the entire Ogada family with children and grandchildren, “and don’t get out of your car or roll down your window no matter what”. The first couple of roadblocks were passable, and often just involved driving around the boulders and rocks in the road. A couple of roadblocks were still smouldering, smoke rising like mist into the forest, a mild reminder of what had happened there the previous day. At one point there was an entire tree across the road, as an ominous warning to turn back. At dawn we encountered our first manned roadblock, in the light of what must surely have been one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve seen. Boulders across the road, a group of men on either side - they moved menacingly towards us before we even stopped or spoke. On the left I caught a glimpse of a bow and arrow, on the right the glint of pangas in seemingly better shape than the one at the farm, and right by my window a man was picking up a big rock, presumably to hurl it at us. I clutched Morné closer to me and when I opened my eyes again we were being waved on. We were the right ethnicity, for the moment at least. I think we breathed a collective sigh of relief at that point, and I counted at least another 15 similar roadblocks before they suddenly ended and the beautiful Lake Baringo came into sight, and I got the camera back out from under the seat.

Attached to each car’s front bumper were sinendet vines used by the Kalenjin to signal that one was on one’s way to a wedding or funeral. This insider information provided by mzee was to faciliate our safe passage as a way of saying “we go in peace”. Later, down in the dry valley, a stark contrast to the lush forests we had just traversed, the drivers removed them quickly, as here it might not be as helpful to be perceived as Kalenjin.

In Iten we met the mzee’s son in law who escorted us the rest of the way to Nakuru, where we heard en route that Luos and Luyas were being flushed out of cars and hacked to death. There we met Paul, my sister in law’s colleague, and a Kukuyu who was to lead us through the final home stretch. A student of Penninah’s called as we arrived there and said, “Wait there, don’t move until I tell you it’s safe, stay there for an hour or so, get a cooldrink or something and pretend for the sake of the children that everything’s normal”. We didn’t know this as we ate hot chips and sipped tepid soft drinks in the midday sun at a roadside café. It was only the next day that she shared the news of this phone call with us. When we eventually set off it seemed to me that the worst must surely be over. An hour into the trip we were suddenly directed on a detour, through a bumpy road, Josh convinced that we were being led off the highway and right into a trap of some kind. Groups of excited young men passed by the slow moving traffic and peered into cars. When they got to our lead car they said “these are Luos in this car”, but mercifully Paul waved them on. I didn’t look back at the highway down below us on the right, too scared for what I might see, and instead read Chicken Licken (his favourite book that week) to Morné, hoping he wouldn’t notice my voice occasionally faltering. Josh’s elder brother later told us that he had seen bodies lying on the road with a machete wielding mob dancing around them. Any earlier (or later) and it might have been us.

I had been scared when we petted a tame cheetah at the animal orphanage in Nairobi a week earlier, but nothing compared to this. Fear remained settled and knotted in the pit of my stomach until I lay in bed that night, amazed to be alive. The Saturday night after our harrowing trip back it seemed fitting that the first song I heard at a small bar called Sippers in Hurlingham was “Celebrate” by Madonna. The Tusker beer bottle caps said “Happy festive season, don’t drink and drive”. Later that night we bought the DJs entire collection of Kenyan hip hop for 1200 shillings (R120). It all seemed pretty surreal after what we’d been through, though we were the lucky ones. The casualties of the Kenyan violence far outnumbered our family. Besides those killed (the press says around 500, aid organisations say thousands), there are the displaced, running or driven from their homes in a senseless war that is, after all, turning out to be ethnically motivated. The literature tells us that violence is a last resort in a stressed population. The existence of violence is a warning that the population is already over-stressed for reasons that are usually obvious. Since 2002 the Kibaki government has been implicated in various corruption and land grabbing scandals, often privileging the Kikuyu people for land ownership and major government jobs. The opposition Luo presidential candidate, Raila Odinga, was seen to represent major change, particularly for the poor and dispossessed. The fact that the conflict is worse in the countryside than in urban Nairobi (except for fighting in urban slums like Mathare and Kibera) is indicative of a problem much larger than discontent with a rigged election. Kenyan politics has been reduced to ethnic alliances, and people perceive their hardships as directly proportional to ethnic favoritism. Politicians have exploited ethnicity to their advantage, and consequently tribalism often overrides any sense of nationalism.

I’ve always had a strong attachment to the continent, and a distinct identity as an African. Having never witnessed the worst of apartheid’s atrocities, and despite living the low intensity war currently being waged in the form of crime, this was the first time that I had witness first hand, the crimson heart of Africa bleeding, as Livingstone once wrote. This was my 4th or 5th visit to Kenya (and I’ve travelled widely in Southern and East Africa) and for the first time I really experienced the continent first hand. I saw right into Africa’s heart and it was filled with beautiful sunrises and beautiful sunsets, but it was also bleeding and tears ran down into her smile. Back in Cape Town Morné asks constantly about his granny and his cousins, and I hope that he will grow up to be as proudly African as I am, despite the tears.

Pictures of the family holiday can be seen at http://uctac.facebook.com/album.php?aid=26560&l=7157a&id=543989288