I have bumped into this this site so late in the year, not because I was trying to update my memory on the ugly happenings, but because I wanted to get in touch with my culture. My only association with the luhya (banyala) is my name. I can pass for any bantu community in Kenya, and across the borders. It may be late but there is comfort in numbers. I am equally of mixed heritage-omunyala and omtachoni, both very proud of their language that they gave us no space to learn one or the other language. That we were born and raised in the capital city did not help either. Indeed, I knew I was Luhya because my History teacher in class 4 told me so, and I believed him. What a genius he was! When we meet as brothers with their families at my father’s house in western Kenya, as was the case in December 07, we could as well be back in the city. My brothers have wives from the Kamba, taita, borana, and the latest addition, Acholi communities. Diversity turned into dilemma.

Thank God my Dad who is widely travelled, still has a bunch of faithfull buddies, and we were all safely whisked to safe zones-amidst tears. I still have hope that we can still turn diversity to strength.

Anyway, the reason I bumped into this conversation. I am looking for a video recording of males being circumcised according to the luhya tradition, so that I can show it to an expartriate family who are keen on their son being circumcised traditionally, at my father’s home in western Kenya. I missed that part as I was in the damned city. Can you help?

Fergal Keane wrote “Kenya’s poor at each other’s throats”, in which these two words “Tribal Violence” to the Western mind means: people driven to kill each other by irrational atavistic hatred. Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7205762.stm

Mary Rehard, thanks for your initiative and concern, however,
while I believe that most NGOs are well intentioned and do help in crisis such as the current one in Kenya, their roles are limited to emergencies such as medicine, food, shelter etc. because they are in the host countries at the mercy of those governments that are the root cause of the problem in the first place. So they become hostages of those governments and can’t confront the root cause of the problem and we keep seeing violence in one country after another.

What I find troubling, is that the Kenyans are being viewed as a violent people who need to be trained in alternative ways to conflict resolution. To use their mind rather than their spears, knives & machettes etc. The last time I heard this slogan “Choose life!” used, was war against AIDS, telling people to use condoms.

Kenyans are not members of savage & uncivilzed tribes that don’t understand what violence or alternatives to violence are.
The question is, why did or is violence taking place now among tribes that have lived together and intermarried with each other?

Violence is a consequence, not the root of the problem. The root has alot to do with our greedy leaders. check this out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6220396.stm
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2892089.stm

February, 07 2008

By Yifat Susskind
Yifat Susskind’s ZSpace Page
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From day-one of the crisis that has gripped Kenya this year, much of the mainstream media has been quick to label the violence “tribal
warfare,” while the top US envoy to Africa called the Kenyan clashes “ethnic cleansing.” The problem with those terms is that they don’t
actually explain anything. Yet many people hear the words “tribal warfare” or “ethnic cleansing” and assume that people’s identity is the root of the violence in Kenya.

We live in a time when the notion of a “clash of civilizations” passes
for political science and an us-versus-them mentality (“you’re either
with us or with the terrorists”) is the basis of super-power foreign policy. The crudeness of those ideas makes it hard to remember that,
while identity can be mobilized in the service of hatred, a person’s
“tribe,” ethnicity, or religion does not cause or motivate violence.

So what does? In the case of Kenya, tribal categories are a short-hand
for describing people’s unequal access to political power and economic resources.

Since Kenya won independence from Britain in 1963, a small Kikuyu elite has dominated government and business opportunities. Meanwhile, most Kenyans have been dangerously impoverished by the debt crisis that began in the late 1970s. Like many countries throughout the Global South, Kenya was forced to sell off state-owned assets like major transport and telecommunications systems and to cut government spending to repay loans to big banks and rich governments (mostly in the US and Europe). As a result, millions of Kenyans have been denied basic resources and services, like health care, clean water, education, and decent housing.

When Mwai Kibaki was elected in 2002, he promised to share power and resources more equitably. Instead, he allowed Kikuyu elites to keep control of the country’s wealth and governing institutions. That
betrayal galvanized support for Raila Odinga’s opposition Orange
Democratic Movement (ODM), especially among the poor. In December 2007, Kibaki’s party rigged national elections to prevent the ODM from unseating him and disseminating political power and access to basic economic resources more broadly.

Those are the real grievances fueling the violence today. They have
their roots not in any “ancient tribal rivalries,” but in government
policies meant to enrich a few at the expense of the majority. Kenya’s
poor majority includes members of the Luo, Luhya, and Kalenjin tribes, who initiated the protests in December, and most Kikuyus, who are not part of the governing clique but have been scapegoated in the crisis.

Thinking of Kenya’s conflict as a class war rather than a tribal war reveals those aspects of the crisis that are about material things: a
fight over access to farmland, housing, and clean water. But that
explanation alone misses a more complex reality. Because identity is
fluid, partial, and somewhat subjective, tribal or ethnic divisions can
be calcified, even created, when identity is invoked to mobilize people
for political ends. Both Kibaki and Odinga are guilty of goading people
to violence in this way. And every time the BBC or the Washington Post
utters the words “tribal warfare,” they help propel the self-fulfilling
logic of identity-based violence. It’s a dangerous game: once violence
is unleashed, it takes on its own momentum. We’ve seen that dynamic
to grave effect in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan. And that may be what we’re witnessing in Kenya now, as protest over a disputed election
seems to have morphed into something uglier and more dangerous.

The way that people define a crisis shapes which solutions they choose.
That’s why a lasting solution to the crisis in Kenya requires junking
the hollow concept of “tribal warfare.” Tackling the poverty and inequality that politicians have perpetuated by manipulating ethnicity
may prove a lot tougher than resolving an electoral blow-out. But there
are Kenyans who are paving the way forward.

On January 25, the “Kenyan Women’s Consultation Group” addressed peace mediators Kofi Annan, Graça Machel, and Benjamin Mkapa. The women call for “comprehensive constitutional reform that would ensure equitable distribution of national resources,” as part of their far-reaching peace proposal. Like many progressive Kenyans, the Women’s Consultation Group recognizes that while inequality in Kenya runs along tribal lines, it’s the inequality, not the tribal identity, that is fueling the violence today.

http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=39&newsid=116131

Story by KEN OPALA
Publication Date: 2/5/2008
She grasps the rosary tightly, exhibiting defiance, not grief. Her two toddlers edge closer but she dismisses them tersely: “Go away, please.”

They come back. “I said go away.” They freeze. “Why mum, we want to be with you?” “No,” she replies.

Neighbours hastily keep the toddlers away from their mother, journalists, friends, relatives and curious people, for they don’t want the young ones to hear how she escaped from the jaws of death. They did not want them to hear how the mother was assaulted as her relatives were being killed.

Depression and paranoia

Ms Rita Nasipwondi, 40, a mother of eight, is hardly conscious of the way she is treating her children. Hers is a life of depression and paranoia.

“I saw my people being chopped like dogs. It was ghastly, horrifying,” she says in her Kibukhusu mother tongue.

She was next in the line awaiting her turn to be killed.

Her eleven relatives were hacked to death at an open field on the hills of Mt Elgon as she watched – and waited for her turn. Her father-in-law and mother-in-law, wife, his brother and the wife, brother-in-law and his wife were all killed at the same filed.

She is now accommodated outside Kimabole trading centre by a good Samaritan.

Nasipwondi is among the latest victims the raging conflict in Mt Elgon instigated by the Sabaot Land Defence Force.

It has targeted specific communities in a veiled plan to evict them from the district. Kirui Komon Matakwei, a 24-year-old Form One dropout is believed to be the commander of the rag-tag force that has claimed lives even in the neighbouring Bungoma and Trans Nzoia.

According to sources, the first week of January was the bloodiest – in the calendar of the militia that has terrorised Kopsiro and Cheptais divisions on the mountain side.

At least 50 people, 22 of them members of the Soy and Dhorobo clans have been killed between December 31, 2007 and January 7, according to survivors.

Local district officer Phillip Tirop and the Kimama location chief Jamin Chemos told the Nation that 22 people were killed on New Year’s Eve.

However, the they said the victims were killed in cattle raids.

At a peace meeting last week convened by the district officer, Mr Chemos local residents ejected Mr Chebos accusing him of bias.

Mt Elgon is tense. The Western Kenya Human Rights Watch, says it has documented 398 deaths at the hands of the militia since August 2006. Another 80,000–more than a third of the district’s population– have been displaced by the attackers who operate from caves and forests in the mountain.

“But there are many people who have been killed and not documented,” says Job Bwonya, the executive director of the human rights lobby.

They include politicians, teachers, students and police officers. Bwonya claims over a dozen police officers were killed last year although he has documented only seven.

The militia overran Nasipwondi’s Kimama Village on December 31, 2007 as the rest of country descended into violence following the disputed elections.

It appears the gang exploited the confusion in the countrywide protests to kill members of a perceived rival community. Many people have been killed in the village yet the story is lost in the caves and thick forests that have been turned into graveyards, according to survivors and human rights activists.

Nearly all residents of Kimama lived as a close-knit family.
Mzee Mafura, the 73-year-old elder killed together with his 12 relatives, settled with his family in Kimama in 1930. His father, Mzee Katila, joined two elders, a Mr Psongoywo and a Mr Sambruma, all Sabaots in 1930. Their families have co-existed since then. Because of its fertile soils, Kimama is notable for its high grade coffee and horticultural produce.

Today, Kimama is an enclave of the militia, thanks to the conflict.

Farms left behind by the deceased and those who fled have been taken over by sympathisers and members of the SLDF.

“They want to create an exclusive enclave for their community, hoping to expand it by overwhelming other communities,” says Taiga Machanja, the coordinator of Mwatikho Centre, another Bungoma-based human rights lobby involved in rehabilitation of torture victims.

Start training

According to witnesses, the boys were trained starting last November in camps up the Chebyuk hill.

They claim that police were aware of the training by had not taken action.

“We used to see them disappear into the forests but it never occurred to us they were planning a massacre,” says Nasipwondi.

For two weeks, this writer scoured Mt Elgon tracing the survivors, relatives and families of those massacred on December 31, 2008.

The story that emerges is a well planned attack on members of a certain community by the terror gang to create an exclusive region for their clan, and hopefully expand it to neighbouring Trans Nzoia and Bungoma District.

On December 31, 2007 the SLDF members moved from one homestead to another isolating members of a particular community. They huddled them together and spirited them to the hills where they killed them. The bodies were later transferred to mass graves at Kamachai Village of Kopsiro Division.

The area is littered with human bodies and skeletons. Nasipwondi was among those isolated at 1pm.

A group of 20 men well known to the mother of four rushed into her compound pelting circumcision songs as they wielded guns and machetes.

An alarmed Nasipwondi rushed to hide her son in the nearby thicket.

The raiders were looking for her, they made it clear as they hit her. “Why are you killing me” she cried out. “(John) Serut (former area MP) has taken away our land and you people are busy tilling your plots, as if you don’t care,” one of the youths replied. (SLDF claims that Mr Serut bungled land allocation in Chebyuk settlement scheme from where people were evicted in 2006) “Give us money, mobile phone and everything,” demanded one of the assailants who attends a local school and had visited Nasipwondi in search of water three days earlier.

In her possession was a bicycle belonging to her husband who was out in the field tending to livestock, and a hose-pipe.

They told her that she was “a prisoner” and frog-marched her to what they called “makaburini” (cemetery).

Thick forest

All along, they bludgeoned and gun-butted her until they reached an open field, next to the banks of River Malakisi. The thick forest disappeared into an open ground.

“This is machinjoni (slaughter ground),” one of the boys told her.
Suddenly she wasn’t the lone prisoner. Her neighbours were there too, so were her relatives, among them Mzee Mafura and his wife Emma, Mzee Nambobi (Mafura’s brother) and his wife Linnet. They were dead.

Six of them were killed as Nasipwondi watched, waiting for her turn. The field was full of bodies, strewn on the thin grass. Some were rotting away, others had been fed on by dogs. The stench of death hung heavily in the air.

Mr Bwonya claimed that the SDLF runs a Kangaroo court at Ng’atip Kong, about three kilometres north of Kaptoboi Primary School, and the many people it “sentences “to death” are slaughtered at this open field.

As the killings continued, Nasipwondi lost consciousness at some point. When she came to her senses, a number of attackers had left and gone back to Kimama Village, to hunt down more victims on farms, in forests and homes.

They zeroed in on Kimama Village, isolating people by the ethnic affiliation. (A man named Jackson was killed but his wife who comes from the militia’s community was spared)

Previous week

They caught up with Rita’s Std Eight son (the one who hid when they had raided earlier) and a relative, 22-year old Dickson Wanyonyi. The school boy tricked them with the Sh300 her mother had given him to purchase household effects. But Dickson, who had just married the previous week, was unlucky. They led him to the slaughter field.

“Get up, come, it’s your time now,” one of the assailants shouted and pulled Nasipwondi from the ground. As she was being stripped (all victims are stripped bare before being killed) a mobile phone rung. The man on the side must have asked how many had been killed because she heard the killers leader answer: “Kumi na mbili boss. Bado kuna wawili wamebaki hapa (Twelve already, boss. Two are remaining.”

He must have been ordered to stop the killing. The raiders escorted Nasipwondi and another young woman back to the homestead in Kimama. Not far away, another group of assailants were rushing Dickson to the butchering field, to finish the job away before sunset.

Write to the author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygvx34qD2Ek

Kenya’s children scarred by violence
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7224401.stm

Van is 13-years-old and comes from the town of Eldoret - one of the flashpoints of Kenya’s recent ethnic violence.

As he talks about the events that befell his family a fortnight ago, his voice drops to a whisper.

“My mother was attacked by men with machetes. I didn’t see it - when I arrived, there was only blood on the floor.”

I went to the neighbour’s house - his leg was broken. I was so very scared. He told me to run for my life.”

It is a story that could have been told by any one of thousands of Kenya’s displaced children.

More than 60 of them are here in the SOS Children’s Home - an orphanage on the outskirts of Nairobi.

For the lucky ones, there is a chance their parents may be missing, but still alive.

The rest of them already know that the events of recent weeks have left them orphans.

Nicholas Makutsa from the Red Cross is one of those tasked with tracing missing parents and children.

“They’ve talked about seeing their parents being killed - they’ve seen people being shot, houses being burnt, even people being burnt alive. It’s been a traumatising experience for them.”

Reunited

And even here, violence is not far away. As we speak, there comes a sound from beyond the gates that causes the children to stiffen with fear - gunshots from a neighbouring slum.

It may be police, or a shoot-out between gangs. But after what these children have witnessed in recent weeks, it is enough to send them scurrying for cover.

Since they arrived here only a handful of children have been reunited with their parents. Today, as they shelter in a classroom from the shooting outside, another one is about to get good news.

Mary is nine-years-old, with a beautiful but troubled face. She stands apart from the other children and says barely a word.

While we are here, the Red Cross gets word that her mother is in fact alive, and on her way to the orphanage

We meet Rosalind at the gate. She tells us of the day that gangs of youths from another tribe set fire to homes in her neighbourhood.

Mary became separated from Rosalind in the panic. For the past fortnight each has thought the other to be dead.

There are no words between mother and daughter when they are reunited - only silent tears. Rosalind takes her daughter’s hand, walks out of the gate and back into a Kenya that has become a fearful place.

They have no home, no money and only a promise of future peace from their feuding politicians.