Navigating Kenya’s perennial politics of fear and violence

The campaign season has entered its final leg and all Kenyans have become political analysts. Political power barons and their lackeys dominate the media space, competing for eyeballs.

We track their every move, tune in at the appointed hour to keep up with their engagements, like fans of a compelling reality TV show.

We spend hours discussing their tactics, analysing the moves of our favourite political power barons flexing muscle at mammoth public rallies, exciting adoring masses with their mere presence.

These special ones, exalted by the offices they seek, hold audiences in a daze. On their large shoulders, our hopes and dreams hang. The young boys watching all this, in the innocence of youth, can only be enthralled with the amount of media consumed these days. It is expected.

As a young boy growing up in the 80s, I believed that presidents were anointed by God. I thought very highly of President Daniel Arap Moi in my pre-teen days. How could I harbour negative feelings for a man who provided free school milk? I was thrilled to have sang in a mass choir, matched past during a scouting parade and saluted my commander in chief at Nyayo stadium.

When I returned home after that memorable Madaraka day event, I told my father about the experience of seeing the president in close quarters.

He listened keenly and did not ask a single question and acted like it was not a big deal. I suppose I was enjoying the bliss of illusion and he did not want to puncture it with the pain of truth.

A new brand of political sycophancy had been normalised under the slogan of 'fuata nyayo" or dissent at your own risk. My father worked in the Ministry of Health and he was a career civil servant. I knew he held political opinions because he read the then popular 'Weekly Review' published by Hilary Ng'weno. But he never discussed politics in the house.

It was a different time in the early 1980s. Politics was a dangerous thing. People did not openly share their views, especially if they were strong ones. In the year 1982, after the attempted August coup by Kenya Airforce officers, my innocence was shattered and I discovered that this thing they called politics was not to be taken for granted.

I had an uncle in the 82' Airforce and the concern for his safety would plague the family for months before his acquittal. It was the first time I came to realise that bad things could happen to good people because of politics. But I lived in a bubble shielded by my parents from the harsh realities of Kenya that affected critics of the government after 1982.

It was not until the early 1990s as political agitation for multi-party rule increased and the dissent became open that I began to understand the influence of politics on everyday life. Looking back, I marvel of how easy it was to become a foolish victim of deception in politics and that ignorance was indeed not bliss.

That last point was brought home while I was in high school as the ethnic clashes erupted in Molo and Likoni, and rogue militia began to emerge to chase out 'outsiders.' It was not reassuring to be in a boarding school where I was a tribal minority. My name marked me as an outsider and I quickly deduced that I was stereotyped as a threat.

It was the first time I truly understood that I could lose my life for no other reason than I was from the wrong tribe, hanging out in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Elections cyclic in Kenya bring with them the threat of violence. Every five years, I go through some level of anxiety even as a seasoned social commentator. It can only be a traumatic event for children who are rudely exposed to the hypocrisy and savagery of political contests before they come of age. They learn that winning at all costs means someone must lose, often innocent bystanders who backed the wrong horse.

Children pick up their influences from observing their parents. They watch them hang on to the politicians' every word, sieving the news broadcast for meaning like prophetic verses. The child reading anxiety in parent's voice, inherits a general distrust for the same politicians that their parents detest. They believe that they have to choose a side largely informed by their ethnic extraction and base survival.

For the most part, we grow up to be our parents, inheriting the same prejudices and fears that our parents harboured. It becomes a case of classic conditioning when we remain unaware of inbred bigotries buried deep in our psyches. We have learned to associate elections with uncertainty.

Young people inherit the anxieties of their parents and regard competitive elective politics as a space of fear and violence. Which is why, with every General Election, Kenyans, despite their best intentions, seem to retreat to the banal cliché of tribal allegiance. In essence, we have been classically conditioned to respond to the politics of fear with every election.