Kwani Trust

• Human Rights Watch seeking Africa Executive Director

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 9:05 pm by Kwani

  Human Rights Watch (”HRW”) is seeking a highly-qualified, senior-level
  professional to head its Africa Division.

  Description: The Executive Director of HRW’s Africa Division is
  responsible for the development and implementation of strategies for
  HRW’s work in Africa and ensuring the setting of programmatic
  priorities, including response to emergencies. S/he is responsible for
  overseeing the division’s research on human rights violations and for
  developing effective advocacy and communications strategies for maximum
  impact. S/he represents the organization frequently before the
  international media and meets with government and other high-level
  officials and coordinates with key colleagues, both within HRW and
  externally with allied organizations and local NGOs. S/he manages staff
  based in three continents, including Africa, supporting their
  development and overseeing security in the field. The Executive Director
  is also responsible for fundraising, identifying and recruiting donors,
  and drafting funding proposals. She or he preferably will be based in
  the organization’s New York City headquarters or another major HRW
  office, but other locations, including a key capital in Africa, may be
  considered. This position requires frequent international travel.

  Qualifications: The ideal candidate will be a self-motivated, creative,
  strategic thinker with substantive, senior-level experience working on
  human rights issues in Africa and the capacity to serve as an effective
  advocate and activist. S/he will have excellent leadership, management
  and organizational skills, including the demonstrated ability to lead a
  team of talented professionals in multiple global locations. She or he
  will be able to juggle multiple tasks and work collegially in a
  demanding, diverse, and fast-paced environment. The ideal candidate will
  have excellent oral and written communications skills in English and
  ideally another relevant language, keen political judgment, proven
  initiative and follow-through, the ability to work quickly and well
  under pressure, and a commitment to human rights. An advanced degree in
  law, international relations, African studies, public policy, or a
  related field is desired, as is familiarity with international human
  rights law.

  Salary and Benefits: HRW seeks exceptional applicants and offers
  competitive compensation and generous employer-paid benefits. HRW will
  pay reasonable relocation expenses and will assist employees in
  obtaining necessary work authorization, if required. Citizens of all
  nationalities are encouraged to apply.

  PLEASE APPLY IMMEDIATELY by emailing in a single submission: a letter of
  interest describing your experience, your resume, names or letters of
  reference, and a brief writing sample (unedited by others) no later than
  April 1, 2008 to program@hrw.org. Please use “Executive Director,
  Africa Division” as the subject of your email. Only complete
  applications will be reviewed. It is preferred that all materials be
  submitted via email. If emailing is not possible, send materials
  (please do not split a submission between email and regular post) to:

  Human Rights Watch

  Attn: Search Committee (Executive Director, Africa Division)

  350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor

  New York, NY 10118-3299

  Fax: (212) 736-1300

• Otieno Amisi - A Tribute, by Tony Mochama

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 12:28 pm by Tony Mochama

  Otieno Amisi’s last critique was published about a month ago (Literary Discourse, February 17, 2008), post-humously - a month after his death on January 16.

  The problem with dying during a period when a nation is undergoing the proverbial Chinese “interesting times” is that one’s demise is buried under an avalanche of stampedes.

  On the day Amisi died, Pentagon member, Mr Najib Balala, was running helter-skelter through Kenyatta Avenue, with GSU officers wielding tear-gas cannisters in hot pursuit.

  These were dangerous times; live bullets were being used to disperse demonstrators in the Opposition strongholds. In fact, the police shooting of an unarmed protester was captured by a KTN cameraman.

  A jolly George O was making fun of a ‘psycho-cop’ and paid dearly for his harmless antics. His last words: “Why have you killed me?”

  Amisi’s death was a quiet affair, sad and I do not know what his final words were. I do however know what his final critique was on my poetry anthology What If I Am a Literary Gangster? and what his last words to me were.

  On December 2, 2007 at Impala Grounds, Nairobi, where Story-mmoja was holding an event, he took the book from me and said: “I am going to do a review of this anthology.”

  Then blinking bright owlish eyes at me, and smiling impishly, he added: “I look forward to reading your response.”

  When I learned of Amisi’s tragic passing, from fellow-journalist, Francis Ilahaka, as I loitered along Loita Street several weeks later, I told my editor, Ms Jane Godia, that I would do a tribute to Amisi.

  Then I thought of our decade-long amiable relationship with Amisi over the years (1997-2007) and realised it was actually a series of literary skirmishes that never degenerated into personal hostility.

  Amisi was playful, sometimes biting in his literary criticisms. He sharpened his pen, without poisoning the tip, and fenced wits careful not to hurt.

  And so instead of the usual ‘lionising’ and eulogising, I will simply bid him farewell.

  Dear Amisi, in your last critic Critics divided as ‘gangsters’ invade the literary scene, you sounded the alarm that men such as Kiraitu Murungi (Song of my Beloved), Raila Odinga (An Enigma in Kenyan Politics), Kalembe Ndile (My Squatters, My Struggles, My Dreams) and myself (What I if Am a Literary Gangster?) have joined ‘the literary fray.’ This is better than the mass history fed to our youth.

  Back to my book, you wrote that some say this “footloose underground writing with urban lingo should be encouraged.”

  I tend to agree with those some, in the sense that I think poetry ought to move beyond the merely ‘heavy letter’ stuff, so that high school students can see the art as the foundation of both critical thought as well as recognise all that is beautiful about the ‘lingo’.

  You said that my approach to serious international issues like global trade imbalances and freedom is light-hearted. True, but not quite. Look at the irony, as demonstrated in the poem Trading Places.

  I prefer, Joe Ngunjiri’s views on my work as showing “a soft heart,” to Egara Kabaji’s who merely sees “defiance, with no poetry or art in it.”

  My poem Sad Dodo begins: “A girl I knew once told me, that I thought it was ‘cool’ to be sad, and spitting Dido at me she told me I’d end, my life dead as a Dodo ”

  Is that not poetry? Don’t we all end life dead as dodos?

  This story was originally published in the Standard newspaper on March 23, 2008

  Tony ‘smitta’ Mochama is a poet and journalist who lives and works in Nairobi. A Law graduate, Tony is also a vodka connoisseur, gossip columnist extraordinaire, and has a collection of short stories coming out soon titled – ‘The ruins down in Africa’. He has also been called a ‘literary gangster’, from time to rhyme. His collection of poetry, ‘What if I am a literary gangster?’ was published by Brown Bear Insignia in 2007.

• Identity and Violence - Daniel Waweru

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 12:27 pm by Daniel Waweru

  In Kenya, violence abounds, as do analyses of its causes and consequences. One quick way of dividing opinion on the matter is to ask four questions: (i) Was the violence planned? (ii) Was it ‘ethnic’? (iii) Was there ethnic cleansing? (iv) Was it ‘political’?

  We aren’t short of people who will answer no to all save the last for boring political reasons; we needn’t worry about them. But others, for presumably non-political reasons, will do likewise. Timothy Williamson once said, in a slightly different context, that “unless names are invidiously named, sermons like this… tend to cause less offence than they should, because everyone imagines that they are aimed at other people.”

  Maina Kiai, Tavia Nyong’o, here’s looking at you.

  My targets offer distinct arguments. Tavia argues that ethnicity is the form, rather than the content, of Kenyan politics, from which it follows, we must assume, that the violence isn’t ethnically motivated. Maina’s testimony before the US House of Representatives’ subcommittee on African affairs included the claims that: (i) ‘What [was] going on in Kenya [was] a political crisis with ethnic
  manifestation because politics in Kenya is organized ethnically,” and (ii) “The violence [was] neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing: The root of the problem [was] not that different ethnic groups decided they could no longer live together.”

  I hope it is evident that the reasoning in each case is unsound. The notions of ‘form’ and ’substance’, which are central to Tavia’s piece, are nowhere clearly characterised. If the substance of politics is the goal at which political action is aimed, then the central claim of the article is false. Kalenjin ethnonationalism, at least in its extreme reaches, is territorial: one of its central aims is the
  exclusive enjoyment of large parts of the Rift Valley. And it imposes normative requirements: Seroney was lauded for the Nandi Hills Declaration in 1969; then, as now, Moi was blamed for not restoring ancestral land to Kalenjin ownership. On a natural construal of ’substance’, ethnicity is part of the substance of Kenyan politics.

  Maina’s testimony may be disposed of briefly. It is not a condition of either genocide or ethnic cleansing that whole communities decide that they cannot live with each other: by that standard, there was no genocide in Rwanda in 1994, for many Hutus chose to defend Tutsis. Equally, from the fact that Kalenjin who protected Gikuyu or refused to participate in the violence were often assaulted, it doesn’t follow that ethnic cleansing didn’t happen in RVP. Likewise, of course, for events in Nyanza, Central Province, and elsewhere. The criterion given is transparently irrelevant.

  So, we have obviously clever people making obviously false assertions and giving obviously bad arguments for them. What gives? We’ll get there, but, first, a quick reminder of the lay of the argumentative land.

  In the past, the Luo Union traded on exclusively ethnic lines; in the present, Transcentury has precisely zero non-GEMA shareholders. Months ago, I had the utterly surreal experience of reading, in quick succession in a bookshop in Nairobi, Colin Leys lament the inability of the Kenyan middle classes to overcome ethnic cleavage in their own obvious common class interests, and Prof. Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o on the necessity of breaking off the Gikuyu bourgeoisie (in an obituary for Ramogi Achieng Oneko, no less). If
  ethnicity already motivates this kind of irrational behaviour, should we not expect it to motivate violence too?

  If you want to explain the violence, you need to explain how attackers are mobilised, how victims are chosen, and how attackers conceived of their victims (more precisely: why the attacker thought the victim merited the attack).

  Class is a poor explanation for all of those: for much of the post-election violence, it doesn’t determine as neat an explanation as does ethnicity. But wait, why are we talking about class and ethnicity at all? Probably because class and ethnicity are (pre)supposed to be exclusive and jointly exhaustive explanations for the violence. The fight is then over which of these is the real cause of the violence.

  The offending assumptions come in different flavours: the unsophisticated idea that class and ethnicity are competing explanations and that class is the sole cause; and the slightly more sophisticated thought that even if class and ethnicity jointly explain the violence, class is the dominant factor because ethnicity is reducible to it in some way. Pending the promised submersion of ethnicity into class, we have no compelling reason to accept the second. The first ought not to be taken seriously, either: there have been distinct kinds of violence, and those who wish to show that there is one cause for all of them bear the burden of proof – it is a heavy one.

  To show that the violence is politically motivated is to make it respectable (or at least comprehensible). Class is a vaguely ‘political’ concept, so the violence is explained in class terms. The gain in intelligibility justifies the choice of class to explain the violence. That overlooks the point that killing people for the identities they bear is also a political act. Any intelligibility gained by appealing to political categories is as available to those who choose identity as it is to those who choose class. Respectability, it appears, is the only reason for denying ethnicity its explanatory power.

  Returning to Kiai and Nyong’o, you’ll notice that they’re at one in denying that ethnicity has independent motivating power: for them, its potency is derivative. In this boggy and treacherous terrain, that thought is the landmark by which the parties orient themselves. The premise is false, which is why those who take their bearings by it have arrived at such strange conclusions.

  Ethnically motivated violence is what it is and not another thing. The beast stares us in the face. Time to stare it down.

• Brotherhood, Or, Dirty Socks

  Posted: April 10, 2008, 12:25 pm by Keguro Macharia

  Even now, the memory of his socks assails me. It was, as with most smells, slow to arrive but full in the moment of its arrival. At first, simply a hint, cause for sniffs and questions. Eventually, ripe, pungent, unmistakable.

  This is a story about brotherhood.

  He was a jock and I sang in the choir. He played rugby and I won awards for “best female.” I devoured Oscar Wilde and he, it is rumored, toyed with steroids. He made being a certain kind of man easy. I struggled to grow into a body that I inhabited uncomfortably. There was little to bind us except the shared experience of first form, shared in the sense that both of us evaded bullying, and the fact that my bed was next to his.

  For weeks, if not months, I inhaled the scent of his rugby-infused socks. His body-at-work became my nightly vaporizer. Each triumph, each loss, each practice, each match, all distilled to this ether. To say that I smelled his socks might be accurate. To say that I inhaled his essence grapples with a more profound truth about how we became brothers: not blood of my blood, but smell of my smell, skin of my skin, air of my air.

  He was only one of the many boys and men I encountered over the course of high school, where the splashing water of adjacent showers meant we shared dirt and clean; the bowls from which we served our rations bore the traces of our dipping spoons; the cold night air carried our discordant voices trying to master traditional English harmonies; and the ground bore the indelible marks of our indistinguishable shoes.

  This was not a brotherhood forged in battle or shared struggle, nor did it partake of those fictions of blood and shared origin. Its fragility was its strength, its tenuousness offset by its tensile strength.

  He was taciturn and I was chatty. I recited poetry and he spoke in sports formations. I barely remember if we spoke after that first eventful year. Our lives diverged, mine devoted to pianos and the men who play them, his devoted to hockey and rugby. When he succeeded, the school cheered. When I succeeded, the school booed.

  Had you called us brothers, it would have been unremarkable. We might have quibbled over who was the elder, the more attractive, the more talented, but, ultimately, we would have agreed that we were brothers. It was not a brotherhood based on what we shared. It happened across ethnicities, across religions, across social interests, across personal tastes, even across sexualities.

  It is the very impossibility of its possibility that anchors my hope in Kenya’s possible futures. For this story is not idiosyncratic or unique. It is shared across schools and workplaces, in army barracks and local bars, on buses and in planes. To smell a stranger might begin an intimacy through which to forge a household, a community, a province, a nation.

  Keguro Macharia is completing his Ph.D. in the United States. He writes non-fiction prose, and has recently been published in Wasafiri and the anthology Identity Envy: Wanting to be Who We are Not. He is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers collective, and can be reached at kmacharia @ gmail . com

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Fish cakes

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Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes