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Kenya expert: Inequality equals
unrest
JOHN WALLER, Staff Writer
9. Feb. 2008
BENNINGTON — Missionaries drove Bennington College professor
Miroslava Prazak to an airstrip last week in one of Kenya's game
parks.
Normally, she would have driven to the capital city before
catching a flight back home, but the roads from Kuria to Nairobi
were not safe to travel. "The towns we would have crossed were all
in flames," Prazak said in her college office Thursday.
Corrupt election
The uprisings began on Dec. 30 after incumbent Mwai Kibaki was
declared the winner of what most Kenyans and Prazak believe was a
corrupt presidential election. So far, its been reported the
violence has killed more than 1,000, injured thousands more and
displaced about 300,000 people from their homes.
Prazak, a professor of anthropology at Bennington College since
1996, has traveled to the same eight communities in the Kuria
District, named for its people, in southwest Kenya on the
Tanzanian border for the past 25 years, half of her life.
It is here where the daughter of a United Nations and World Bank
economist, who grew up in Pakistan, the island of Antigua in the
West Indies and Sudan, has come to study the region's people and
culture. "They have become my people," Prazak said with a Kenyan
flag hanging behind her on her office wall.
On her recent four-month trip, Prazak studied the region's rural,
poor families with help from 12 young Kenyan employees and a grant
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Rural poor
The group has collected information about orphans, AIDS and HIV,
and other economic and social statistics to see how families in
the region are changing and to see how government policies are
affecting Kenya's rural poor.
Prazak said most people in Kuria support Kibaki's opposition,
Raila Odinga, of the Orange Democratic Movement, who has called
himself the, "people's president," and who many believe is the
country's rightful leader.
Odinga has advocated a system that would spread out the country's
power. Odinga, who won six of Kenya's eight provinces and whose
party won the vast majority of parliamentary elections, was
leading Kibaki by a million votes before the news was blacked out,
the results delayed, and Kibaki declared the victor, Prazak said.
Odinga and Kibaki have been meeting with former U.N.
secretary-general Kofi Annan. Prazak said it appeared no end was
in sight on Thursday. "Personally, I don't know how it will be
resolved short of Kibaki stepping down," she said.
On Friday, Annan reported that the two were working on an
agreement where they would share power, something which seemed
impossible to Prazak a day before.
The men are not so different. Odinga campaigned for Kibaki in
2003, in the country's first democratic presidential election
since it became independent in 1963, Prazak said. Kibaki is the
country's third president, she said. Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap
Moi were the first two, combining to rule the country for 40 years.
Flawed process
Although many international sources have pegged the uprisings as
simple ethnic or tribal conflicts between Kibaki's privileged
Kikuyu tribe and disenfranchised tribes, such as the Luo and
Kalenjin tribes, Prazak said the conflicts are more about economic
inequality and a deeply flawed democratic process.
"Economic difference is truly at the heart of what is happening,"
she said. "... It's not about ethnic clashes. It's about a
political process that has gone wrong."
When Prazak needed to travel to the nearby town of Migori, also in
the country's Nyanza Province, to use the bank, she saw the ugly
effects of built-up class resentment first hand. Stores and shops,
owned by businessmen from central Kenya, had been looted and
burned, she said.
Other than the electoral commissioner's house being burned the
night of the election results, Kuria has remained peaceful, mainly
because of its fairly homogenous population, Prazak said.
Kuria, which is 60 miles inland from Lake Victoria, 6,000 feet
above sea level and 1 degree below the equator, has still been
affected by the unrest elsewhere, she said. Deliveries to the
region, such as fuel, mail and food, have been stopped on the
paved roads that lead to Kuria, she said.
Despite Kenya's reported economic growth and multiple fertile
growing seasons, Prazak said the vast majority of the country's
people remain poor. The country's wealth has gone to a very small
minority and the government has stolen billions of dollars from
its people, in such scandals as the Goldenberg scandal, leading to
the economic gap, she said.
In Kuria, the region's subsistence farmers live in one-floor
houses with stick-and-mud walls and thatched-grass roofs with no
electricity and no running water, Prazak said. A nicer house in
the region might have homemade-brick walls and iron-sheet roofs,
she said, but are still one-floor and have no utilities.
"If all things were fair and equal, people should be amassing
capital in the region, not just trying to break even," she said.
In 1988 the eight communities Prazak studied had about 230
families, now that number has risen to more than 550, she said.
Twenty years of population growth has created its problems, as
families struggle to find enough land to farm to survive, she said.
In these communities, Prazak said 40 families have no parents,
leaving orphans to fend for themselves with no social services to
protect them. The $300 per year fee for secondary school in Kenya
is nearly impossible for an average family to afford — the
country's per capita income is about $1,000 — but for orphans the
fee seems unworldly, Prazak said.
Prazak is currently paying for four Kenyan orphans from the
community to attend secondary school. Children are often orphaned
because the country's life expectancy is only 46 and increasingly
because of AIDS and HIV, Prazak said. Although the AIDS and HIV
epidemic has not reached the same levels, yet, of countries in
southern Africa, she said.
People's view of the politics in the region has drastically
changed since the recent presidential election. Prazak called the
election, "a real setback for Kenya's democracy."
"In the fall and winter people were so energized," she said,
adding 78 percent of the electorate voted. "They were excited
about the possibility of having a voice and the difference it
would bring."
New demands
Prazak said Kibaki's failed promises of ending corruption and
decreasing the president's power led to support for Odinga. She
said in her 25 years people have become increasingly sophisticated
about politics and have started demanding a transparent process.
"In the 1980s, people never talked about politics; it was too
dangerous, she said.
Mobile phones and increases in freedom of speech have greatly
changed the country's political scene, Prazak said.
Still on sabbatical from the college, Prazak said she will wait
until conflicts have been resolved before she will return to Kenya
to finish her research.
Although she said the Kuria have been open and generous with her
from her first day, she said now she is very close with the people
in the region and they feel a strong stake in her life's work.
"Physically, I'm back," Prazak said, "but I can never really leave
behind what I do in Kenya."
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