Heidi and Seal in the happy days before their marriage hit the skids. (PrettyWomanPhotos.com).

Singer Seal, caused a stir a few days ago when he criticised his soon-to-be ex-wife, former supermodel Heidi Klum, for showing a lack of class by sleeping with “the help”, i.e. her bodyguard of four years, Martin Kristen.

“I guess the only thing I would have preferred is that…Heidi show a little bit more class and at least wait until we separated first before deciding to fornicate with the help, as it were,” Seal told the popular entertainment website TMZ.

It was a terrible thing to say and, not surprisingly, shortly after words Seal walked back the comments and apologised to Klum, with whom he has four children.

However, by trying to put down his estranged wife by alleging she was sleeping with the help who was beneath, Seal served up the most common and emotional item of snobbery, grievance and debate on the gossip and relationship pages, and call-in programmes on FM stations in Africa. On the day the subject is about the Big Man of the house who is found curled up in the “housegirl’s” bed, or “Madam” (if I may adopt that peculiarly East African use of the word) sleeping with the gardener, the guard, or driver, the switchboards go crazy with callers.

In the case of Seal, a black man, I think he was stupid to say something like that in the US. In America today, some conservative churches still refuse to wed mixed race couples.  Barely 50 years ago, Seal would have been lynched for dating (let alone marrying) a white woman. The reason black men were murdered for sleeping with white women is because conservative opinion held that people of colour were inferior to whites. That by touching white women, black men made them “impure”.

Seal’s view that Klum showed a lack of “class” by dating Kristen is a prejudice in the same class. Kirsten, presumably, is inferior to Klum in social rank, and therefore he doesn’t deserve her.

Make no mistake about it, it is hurtful and destructive if your husband sleeps with the househelp (“housegirl” to use the more politically incorrect rendition), or if your wife shacks up with the muscular gardener or security guard.

The real problem with  all this for me is not that a man or woman who holds a high position has climbed into the dungeons for a bit of working class sex. The biggest problem is that THEY COMMITTED ADULTERY, or more benignly, cheated. They violated their marriage contract.

However, what seems to pain a minister’s wife when her hubby cheats with the housegirl is that by doing so he “lowered her to the level of the housemaid”. A big man whose wife has an affair with the driver, likewise feels that he has “brought down to the driver’s level”. In other words, what hurts the most is the Big Men and Women’s egos, not their sense of morality.

There are many problems associated with this, one of them being abuse of power. The housegirl is usually vulnerable, so in order to preserve her income, she will have sex with the boss just to keep her job. And the gardener too pretty much can’t say to “madam” for the same reason.

I am a sort of prudish and abstemious chap, and will say that if my wife finds me fondling the housegirl, she is perfectly entitled to shoot me. It is wrong. But I am also scientific and scholarly about stuff, and I think that if we look up the bigger picture, shagging across the class line might actually be a socio-political and evolutionary necessity.

First, the rich and powerful in Africa (and indeed most of the world) often treat their domestic workers like crap. They starve, beat, insult them, arbitrarily dock their pay, and sometimes refuse to pay them. A housegirl so abused by madam, can get some justice by sleeping with the man of the house as a form of noble revenge.

One moral of the story of the princess and the frog, is that even the lowly can find love in the castle up above.

If you are a Big Man, and your driver takes you allover town as you drop in one your many mistresses, as he waits in the car all day without even taking a break for a meal, he probably feels that he has evened out the score when he sleeps with your wife.

Since housegirls and gardeners are too powerless and penniless to fight injustice against them by their employers in the courts or media, these little acts of revenge reduce their anger. In that sense, they have a social stabilising value. Consider the babysitter, for example. Is it better if she murders the child and stuffs it in the refrigerator because the woman of the home was cruel to her, or if she sleeps with the husband in revenge?

Beyond the palliative effect of the Revenge of the Downtrodden that a gardener gets from a frolic with his “master’s” wife, there are bigger stakes.

A critical factor in the survival of human society is the diversification of our genes. It is why incest remains one of the most horrible things in most societies in the world. By and large, societies that marry broadly and permit relationships across wider racial, religious, and class divides tend to be more successful. In the Middle East, for example, I have this suspicion that with all its terrible ways towards the Palestinians, the Israel has still been able to hold their enemies at bay in the region and be technologically and scientifically more advanced – because it is a very diverse society. Over the years, it has drawn in Jews from all sorts of strange corners of the world. Arab societies, especially the oil rich ones, are socially conservative and some still deny their women the freedom to choose their partners, let alone simple pleasures like driving (their fear of their women straying led to extensive castration of men and the world’s largest population of eunuchs in that part of the world centuries ago).

Sex, you might say, gives Israel its military and technology edge in the Middle East. The US has also done well through immigration. For many decades it renewed its intellectual and cultural resources through immigration.

By the same token, if people from the same background continue intermarrying, the quality of their offspring declines over time. For that reason, the “upper” classes need to periodically renew their ranks by drawing from the working class virility of the housemaid, and the purity of the gardener’s peasant stock.

Traditional African societies understood this well. If a couple kept bearing dimwits for children, infidelity was the way in which women gambled on improving the quality of their offspring. A roll in the banana plantations with the neighbour would, hopefully, do it. Among the Baganda of central Uganda, once one of the greatest kingdoms in Africa, this insurance policy has been codified in family succession.

Marriage – and sex – across class lines has been a great redistributor of wealth. Otherwise generations of families could be condemned to clean and mop for others forever.

While after a man dies the male elders are the ones who install his heir, a scholar of Buganda’s ways tells me that the elders actually merely announce the decision that a council of the wise women of the clan will have made. The women caucus secretly at night, because they are the ones who know which child was fathered by the now dead man, and which one by the herdsman. Having made the choice, they whisper the name to the male elders who announce the heir. This is one reason why, in many African societies where heirs are installed this way rather than by a will, the choices made can be very bewildering.

So the idea that people cannot sleep up or down, is actually dangerous to the survival of the human race.

Finally, marrying across the class line is one of the most efficient redistributors of wealth. If a semi-literate woman born into a poor family could never marry or have a child with a rich man, generations of her family would be trapped in poverty forever. And if humble horsemen could never marry the princess, the fortunes of their poor families would never improve.

This is the moral of all those children’s fairy tales, where the princess meets the frog that turns into a handsome sporting lad; they marry; and live happily ever after, is all about.

A good friend back in Kampala likes to say that there are only two sure ways to become wealthy. One, you marry into wealth. Second, you inherit it.  There many other paths to riches of course, except that they are littered with too much heartbreak, inhumanly long hours of work, and uncertainty.

Now that he knows better, perhaps Seal can sing about that.

• cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com / twitter@cobbo3

Thousands turned up for Zenawi’s funeral in Addis Ababa – and also thousands celebrated his demise.

On September 2, 2012, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was buried in the capital Addis Ababa.

It was an emotional event, and the high and mighty of Africa all assembled, and messages poured in from all over the world.

However, many Ethiopians who hated Zenawi, a man they viewed as an autocrat and dangerous tribalist, were instead celebrating his demise.

This represented the contradiction — and tragedy — of Zenawi; reformist and autocrat in equal measure, and a hero and villain in equal measure too.

The first part of this, “Meles Zenawi; Encounters With The Good, Bad, And Ugly Faces Of African Power”, (http://nakedchiefs.com/2012/08/31/meles-zenawi-encounters-with-the-good-bad-and-ugly-faces-of-african-power/)”, told of the crackdown on journalists in Ethiopia, particularly in 2005 and 2006 following a violent and disputed election, easily the worst period in media repression by the Meles government.

I travelled to Ethiopia then as part of a Committee to Protect Journalists mission, to plead for the more than one dozen journalists who had been jailed.

The journalists were being held in Kaliti Prison outside Addis Ababa. The prison was built of metal roof material and was sweltering because it was located in a semi-arid patch of land.

But the drive there was impressive. Nairobi today has an impressive network of new and rebuilt roads and flyovers, and the Thika Superhighway.

Addis Ababa, while not having the elaborate network that Nairobi has built, got there first.

It was the enduring duality of the Meles era that you travelled on one of the best road networks in Africa to go to one of its most primitive prisons where journalists and regime opposition were being held.

The image of Ethiopia that most of the world still has is probably that of a country plagued by famine. Wrong. One of the legacies of Meles is that he virtually ended the blight of famine in which Ethiopia had been trapped for nearly a century.

Agricultural turn-around

Famine victims in Ethiopia in 1984: Zenawi’s government all but eliminated such scenes.

From 1983 to 1985, Ethiopia was struck by its worst famine of modern times. An estimated 400,000 people died of hunger. The epicentre of the famine was a place called Korem.

In Korem, the celebrated Kenyan photojournalist Mo Amin captured on film suffering on a scale the world had not seen for long. It shocked the world but rallied international action that led to the “Live Aid” concerts phenomenon — and made musician Bob Geldof a superstar.

Mo Amin’s son, Salim Amin, recently returned to Korem and did a new documentary, “Return To Korem”. Twenty-seven years later, it has very modern agriculture and is highly irrigated. Not even the greatest of optimists would have imagined then that Korem would be where it is today — a model of agricultural prosperity — for another 100 years.

That was Meles’s work. But just as in the past, his government had gone as far as banning short messaging service (SMS) for “security reasons”, and in June the world woke up to the news that the Ethiopian government had criminalised the use of Skype and other such services like Google Talk.

Using Skype is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison! It was done because of “national security concerns” — and, analysts believe, to protect the State’s telecommunications monopoly.

Meles’s Ethiopia was also one of the few African countries that filtered its people’s Internet access and blocked opposition blogs and critical news websites.

Meles cannot, ultimately, be judged alone. His rule provided one of Africa’s best case for examining the vexing issue of the “authoritarian bargain”, the typical political situation still prevalent in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, where citizens relinquish political rights — or accept to put up with some dictatorship — for economic goods (development).

The authoritarian bargain, or the developmental dictatorship, probably paid off for Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea — and today China — because they don’t have the complex ethnic (call it tribal), clan histories, and the political fissures of most of Africa.

In Africa, Meles-style repression, even where it creates economic improvement, breeds resentment that is usually sorted out through massacre and marginalisation when the benevolent autocrat dies or his party loses power, post-Felix Houphouet-Boigny’s Côte d’Ivoire being one of the best examples in the world.

The smooth transition to democracy and prosperity, with only a few figures from the old dictatorship tried in court as happened in South Korea, doesn’t happen.

Minding the national cake

In Ethiopia, Meles’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition looks likely to continue its hold on power, but were it to collapse, it is impossible to see how it would happen without some blood flowing on the streets — and the persecution of his Tigrinya base.

However, even without such an outcome, the areas that usually have a grievance against a government are the ones that feel they are not getting their fair share of a national share based on their contribution.

In Nigeria, it is the Delta region over oil. The rebellion there disrupted production for years. In other countries, it is where agriculture or livestock farming is developed and are the countries’ breadbasket, and the local farming elite feel they are being treated badly.

In East Africa, central Kenya during Daniel arap Moi’s rule, and the “Luwero Triangle” in central Uganda, where President Yoweri Museveni based his rebellion, in the years between 1980 and early 1986.

Cracking down on them, in the name of development, is like cutting one’s nose to spite the face, because the repression unsettles the most productive areas and slows down or reverses growth.

Also, Meles’s Ethiopia proved yet again that the people who give authoritarian regimes the most trouble are the smart ones — successful peasants, bright professionals, shrewd businessmen.

Imprisoning them, and denying them licences and opportunities, serves mostly to remove a large segment of the most innovative population from contributing to the economy.

And when they go into exile, they create a vocal, articulate body of activists that creates reputation and diplomatic problems for the government — here the case of Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe are as good as that of Ethiopia.

Because of this, there develops bitterly contending narratives. One side, one by the regime and its friends heralding its reformist and economic growth credentials. And on the other, a human rights and dissident narrative, often based abroad, highlighting corruption, abuses and election rigging, which devalues the work the regime is doing at home.

Arresting and dealing with an opposition supporter the Uganda way: This approach creates a large constituency seeking revenge and destruction of the legacy of the dictator when he falls from power.

In this way, when the regime falls there is a popular demand to dismantle its work so there is no continuity. Secondly, the regime itself will not realise the growth and development potential it would have achieved if it were not repressive, meaning it can never really reach the levels of growth it needs to reduce poverty significantly.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Meles and other benevolent dictators always had, and still have, better ways of dealing with the Opposition. What they need to do is to understand our societies better and act on that.

Now, both African Government and Opposition leaders have one thing in common — they love the pomp of office. They want to be modern examples of the kind of chiefs our great grandparents were.

New manual for the African dictator

A smart government, rather than jailing the Opposition, can do one simple thing — pamper them. Assume a government provides that the Opposition leaders of parties that get more than 2.5 per cent of the vote at (rigged) elections would be entitled to a government house, a big car, a salary of $15,000 a month, $25,000 for staff expenses, and one holiday for the leader and his family a year. Opposition politicians would shut up and cash in.

At the end of the day, that would still be far cheaper than the cost of sending the army to lay a whole opposition region to waste.

That leaves the Press, which Meles really tormented. You will always have stubborn journalists, but governments don’t have to kill or imprison them.

And government politicians will not succeed by giving them sacks filled with money. Some will not take the bribe, while others will but then go ahead and stab you in the back.

The democratic way to muzzle the Press in developing media markets like Africa is to bribe it with policy. If I were a velvet-gloved dictator, I would begin by making all newsprint tax free.

However, for any newspaper company to benefit from it, they would have to sign a “public service” agreement with the government, in which it agrees to use the newsprint for the “advancement of the public good and development”.

Likewise, TV and FM stations would also be able to import their equipment tax-free. They, too, would have to sign the same agreement.

Apart from not paying duty on their newsprint and equipment, my government would argue that to conform to the principle of not taxing knowledge, media would pay zero value added tax (VAT).

Any newspaper or TV station that gets too critical, like beginning to count the number of my cousins I have appointed ambassadors, would be accused of “incitement” and lose its “public service” status.

They can choose to continue in business, but the newspapers would now have to pay full tax on their newsprint and VAT on copy sales. The TV or radio station would have to pay VAT on advertising.

To make sure the media is encouraged to comply, the law would be written so that a media house that loses its “public service” status would have to pay back taxes for the period it enjoyed the facility.

The effect of that is that the loss of “public service” status by a media house would invariably end in its bankruptcy.

Ivory Coast’s Houphouet-Boigny was Africa’s model benevolent dictator. But all his great works unravelled after his death.

In order to give my government deniability, the law would be written such that it is the Revenue Authority that decides on how much back taxes the media house should pay, and closes it down if it fails to.

As President, all I would need to do is invite the Revenue Authority Commissioner to lunch quietly, and gently remind him about who appointed him to the job.

You will be surprised by the level of media compliance. Journalists might be idealistic, yes, but neither are we happy to lose our nice houses and cars. With those kinds of bitter-sweet policies, there would be no need to throw reporters or editors into prison; no midnight knocks on the door of investigative journalists as they did in Tanzania.

The end is that there would be no bitterness.

That is “enlightened repression”. It is more efficient. It gets better results. Costs less money. Barely damages a government’s international reputation. No bones are broken. No one is killed. And no journalist needs to be thrown in jail.

In the end, it avoids building a large constituency committed to overthrowing and reversing everything the past regime did. In that way, the momentum of development is preserved.

Authoritarian leaders like Meles in Africa may rebuild their economies, put millions of children through school and immunise them against all sorts of diseases, but spoil it all by failing to see that there is an easier and smarter way to be a despot than the paths they choose.

(Also published in Saturday Nation, Nairobi, Kenya on September 8, 2012: http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/-/1064/1499696/-/9h97b8/-/index.html).

 • cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com / twitter@cobbo3

Voters rough up a man alleged to have been bribing voters at the Musoli voting centre during today’s by-elections in Ikolomani. (Photo WestFM).

Speaking about what promises to be a hotly election next year, President Mwai Kibaki recently advised Kenyans to “eat politicians’ money if it is offered”, but to vote with their heads.

Last year Uganda’s opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye made the same argument during the campaigns for the presidential elections early in the year. And, indeed, African voters have shown themselves to be cynical and cold hearted. Stories of politicians going into debt and “pouring money”, but losing the election nevertheless, then running mad, are not uncommon.

The idea that money does NOT always buy you the heart of the person you give it to is the basis of free enterprise and, indeed, some elements of democracy – you accept the leadership and enjoy the benefits from the policies of a president who is elected by the majority, even though you don’t like him or her.

Thus, if I own a shop or a pub, I will take your money, sell you what you want, but still detest you.

The sharp edge of this happens in the prostitution industry. A sex worker doesn’t have to love the men she sells her services to – she wouldn’t be able to function if she did so.

So just how far does this “neutral” or “amoral” role of money go? Some evangelical churches, for example, reject tithe from “sinners”. The idea being that if the money was obtained “immorally”, then it can never be clean even if, for example, it was used to buy food for a hungry child.

A naughty veteran Ugandan journalist, the late David Musoke, told my favourite dirty-versus-clean money joke to me many years ago.

The sex industry has some uncanny parallels with politics.

A Catholic and Protestant bishop appeared on a TV talk show. The presenter asked the Protestant bishop if he would accept to rehabilitate the church from money given by a prostitute.

The Protestant bishop was outraged: “That is money made from sin, it is dirty, I would never accept it”, he said.

Then he asked the Catholic bishop the same question:

“Who am I to judge the Lord’s plan”, said the Catholic bishop; “All things on Earth are placed there by God. It is him who knows best. I would take the money”.

Some years ago, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni used to say that the Bible had spoken on this dilemma. Somewhere the Bible says (I don’t know where in the good book), he would claim, “I am with you, not of you”. That is the equivalent, as the expression goes, of sleeping in the same bed and having different dreams.

I doubt though that this dilemma is really resolved. For example, taken too seriously, it would undermine the obligation of citizenship – e.g. you don’t have to love or give back to your country, even though you do well by it.

Or, you can claim to be both a tribalist and nationalist.  And, corruption would be justified, if the proceeds were put to good use, like building a hospital.

Perhaps, Kibaki and Besigye’s advice applies everywhere else except in the area they recommended – politics.

 • cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com / twitter@cobbo3

Akuku Danger and four of his very many wives: Men are no longer made like him.

October 3, 2012 was the second anniversary of the death of Ancentus Ogwella Akuku, who was better known as Akuku Danger.

A Wikipedia entrance repeats the popular story that Akuku was nicknamed “Danger” because “women were very attracted by his handsome looks”. He died on October 3, 2010, aged 94.

The Wikipedia post says Akuku Danger married his first wife in 1939 and became a polygamist at the age of 22.

In his life, Akuku married over 100 wives, divorced 85 on grounds of infidelity, and sired 160 children. He outlived 12 of his wives, marrying the last one in 1992.

Also, that there were so many children in his family that Akuku established two primary schools solely to educate his brood, as well as a church for his growing family to attend. I hadn’t heard those details before.

There are no longer men like Akuku Danger in Kenya, or elsewhere in Africa or the world, for that matter.

The times have changed so much that in some parts of the world, if you portray yourself as a model citizen and are a leading member of your church, then it is discovered you have a secret mistress, you will have to resign your job, move away from the neighbourhood, or even emigrate in shame.

Faced with building newly independent nations, leaders like Jomo Kenyatta almost resorted to ruling with an iron fist.

There were many remarkable men (rarely women) in those days. One of the few exceptions in East Africa was in western Uganda, where the legendary Queen Nyabingi Kaigirwa led the Nyakishenyi revolt against British colonialism.

More popularly known as the “Nyabingi Revolt”, it was over 10 years before it was crushed. It is a little known fact, but the Nyabingi revolution partly inspired the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. They adopted Queen Nyabingi as their spirit of revolution.

That was the age of new things; of change, and the various struggles to adapt gave us memorable characters. One of my friend’s grandfather’s was among the first “natives” allowed to buy and drink whisky by the colonialists (you needed a licence to buy modern drinks in colonial Africa those days).

The story goes that he would give each of his most prized visitors half a tot each. Because of that, his bottle of whisky lasted about 10 years!

The grandfather of my friend, Ugandan journalist and commentator Andrew Mwenda, was also a man apart. A powerful chief, he was among the first Ugandans to own a motorcycle. However, he thought it beneath his stature to ride. Therefore he had a rider.

However, he wanted all his subjects to see him sitting on his motorcycle, so he got the rider to ride low with his chin resting on the handle bars, so that all and sundry could see him in his full majesty without obstruction.

My own maternal great grandfather, didn’t disappoint. His exploits as a warrior preceded him. He was a substantial cattle owner by the standards of his time. He had a rule; any heifer in his and the surrounding villages that resembled any of his bulls, was his. His bull, he argued, must have sired it.

Africa’s powerful post-independence leaders too were cut from the same cloth. They were very avuncular and old school in disciplining people.

Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda was Anglophile to a farcical level; and his ministers lived in fear of him. His was the old way.

It is rumoured that Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda would sometimes cane errant ministers and public servants on their bottoms. In the case of Banda, the junior ministers allegedly spoke to him while kneeling.

These stern and humiliating ways, to be sure, persisted into current times. Chad’s strongman President Idriss Deby, for example, still slaps his ministers.

It seems the pressures of those times required extraordinary responses. Akuku Danger was the aberration that grew from the evolving idea that a man should only marry if he had the means to look after his family. Before that, the village looked after the children.

Men like Kenyatta and Banda, for all their faults, had the difficult task of building new independent states and managing levels of expectations that later leaders cannot even begin to imagine. Impatience, and a refusal to suffer fools gladly, was the only way they could succeed.

In Uganda, Milton Obote tends to be vilified these days. However, in the short eight years between October 1962 and January 1971 when he was overthrown by Gen Idi Amin, he built more classrooms, hospitals and dispensaries, and opened more roads than all the Uganda presidents of the last 40 years combined!

My two friends’ grandfathers were grappling with new notions of private property, and what today we call “celebrity status”.

These men changed their world because they did something wonderfully old-fashioned — they never missed the morning roll call. Obote, for one, was always in his office at 7.30am without fail.

(A slightly shorter version of this article has been published in Daily Nation (Nairobi, Kenya): http://www.nation.co.ke/blogs/A+great+history+of+our+polygamists/-/445642/1524092/-/view/asBlogPost/-/37txg6z/-/index.html)

• cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com / twitter@cobbo3

One of the things that most undermines African democracy is election theft.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe (L) failed to pull off a clinical electoral swindle, and after months of stalemate, had to share power in a coalition government with Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai (R).

If you look at many bouts of violence and guerilla wars in several countries in Africa – from Yoweri Museveni’s war that started in February 1981, the Algeria civil war that began in 1992 after the military-dominated government cancelled elections set to be won by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and Kenya post-election violence in early 2008 after the fiasco of the December 2007 polls – all them have their roots in a subverted vote.

For years many have been vexed by election rigging on the continent, but it persists. Lately, I have been thinking that perhaps we would do well to look at this issue in new ways, and to find explanations for why vote stealing does not go out of fashion.

First, perhaps we need to reluctantly acknowledge that not everyone can steal and election. You need to have the guts to take the risk; to have firm control of the state machinery; the ability to organise the heist; and the shamelessness to face the country and world as president, when they all know that that you stole the victory. Very few of us can do that. Election theft therefore is a reward for a rare type of gutsy, insanely shameless, and unusually power hungry and greedy individuals.

The second, and probably most important thing is that election rigging in developing countries might actually provide much needed predictability. The problem with our countries is that the level of uncertainty going into elections can be very high; look at Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Egypt, Cameroon, Togo, name it – you are just not sure whether there will be violence, how many people will be killed, or whether a mad man (a tribal bigot, dangerous populist, or crazy religious fundamentalist) will emerge winner.

Compare that to the choices the US is facing in the November 6 election between President Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney. The two men are known quantities, and you can be sure to a confidence level of 85 percent about what you will get when either wins.

As soon elections end in Uganda – usually in controversy – President Museveni lets the dogs out. He swamps the streets with soldiers, to discourage a violent fall-out.

The countries in Africa where uncertainty is low going into elections, are usually the ones where the governments have a record of clinical election cheating – for example in Uganda. There is a lot of noise, seesawing opinion polls, and Opposition energy during elections in Uganda (especially when President Yoweri Museveni is pitted against long-term rival, the brave hearted Dr Kizza Besigye), and government are cheats confronted by the people on Election Day.

As soon as the voting closes, however, the Museveni machine moves in. It sees to it that the vote is counted “correctly” to ensure the Big Man is not trailing. Newspapers and radio stations insisting on reporting results other than those vetted by the Machine, will have intelligence operatives visiting their offices, shutting down their websites, and pulling down their transmitters. Mysteriously, it becomes difficult to access Facebook and Twitter.

Then they let the dogs out. Heavily armed soldiers and Military Police, armoured cars, tanks, pour out into the streets and secure all key points, and around the country they will take over strategic hills and mount their anti-aircraft guns, and throw roadblocks all over the country.  The President will appear on TV to give a “stern warning” to troublemakers, and that will be it. Ugandans are stubborn and no longer fear guns that much, thanks to many years of war. However, very few ever have the nerve to confront Museveni’s post-election lockdown.

I think the knowledge that the state will leave no loose ends in rigging polls in that fashion, and that it will deploy sufficient terror resources to discourage violence and looting, is probably a great source of certainty in Africa, than not knowing how an election will end.

It is pretty much why if you are a journalist covering war, or a soldier, the sound of gunfire is actually good. You know that if you can hear it, then the bullets have not hit you and you are still alive – some bloke will probably be dead though. Also, it is a signal to take cover.

It is also the reason snipers are one of the most terrifying and demoralising features of war. You don’t know where they are hiding, and you are not sure whether they will shoot you next.

Election rigging removes all similar uncertainties. If you are an opposition politician and you have $10m for campaigns, then the high probability that the vote will be fiddled, guides you to invest only $7.5 million of that money in the election. The other $2.5 million you keep as insurance for paying rent, putting food on the table, fuelling the car, and paying the kids’ schools after victory is stolen from you. Of course, you would have been happier if you had got the prize you went in for – the presidency itself.

• cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com / twitter@cobbo3

 So what does Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame REALLY think about accusations (which he denies) that he, or at least some key figures in the Rwandan government and military, are the patrons of the Democratic Republic of Congo rebel group M23 that recently captured the eastern city of Goma?

What does he think of “international justice”? Is Rwanda going to blink over aid cuts and the threat of sanctions for its alleged support for the M23 rebels? Does Kagame and the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) see the history of the Great Lakes the way we outsiders do, or do they have a totally different take?

President Kagame, Rwanda’s Foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo, and the country’s Defence minister Gen. James Kaberebe, to name a few, have said a lot in recent months at home and abroad (especially the UN) in defence of Rwanda.

Kagame came out swinging (New Times photo).

Yet, curiously, perhaps the most telling views on the DRC crisis and the best indication of how Rwanda sees itself and the world, came last month from President Kagame. They were not reported much, because they were made at an event that most journalists would consider too boring to cover – the launch of The Judicial Year (of all things!) in Parliament on October 4, 2012.

Maybe Kagame chose the occasion precisely for that reason; knowing he would put his views out there for those who needed to know to know, but because the media wouldn’t be paying too much attention, it would not cause too many ripples. The speech is unusually emotional for Kagame, and he takes controversial – and even politically incorrect – positions on a range of issues. He also, for the first time, gives a picture of the kind of person he would like to succeed him when his term ends in 2017. By extension, he makes a public commitment to step down when that time arrives.

BECAUSE OF THAT NakedChiefs.com BRINGS YOU A SHORTENED VERSION OF KAGAME’S VERY REVEALING GLOVES-OFF SPEECH. YOU MIGHT HATE IT, YOU MIGHT LOVE IT, YOU MIGHT DISMISS THE ARGUMENTS. WHATEVER, IT IS A BLOODY WORTHY READ:

 We are here for two reasons:

The first is to witness the swearing-in ceremony of Hon. Mukakarangwa Clothilde, Madam Ombudsman, Cyanzayire Aloysia, and the Army Chief of Staff, Land Forces, Maj. Gen. Frank Kamanzi.

We are also here to launch the 2012-2013 Judicial Year. This is an opportunity to present to Rwandans the new plans for the judicial year.

There is no doubt that the Judiciary in Rwanda has greatly improved. Many Rwandans have trust in their Judiciary and so does the international community. The international community has recognised this progress and this is why there is now good collaboration in transferring (genocide) cases to be tried in Rwanda.

Although our judiciary has generally improved significantly, we still have challenges that we cannot control – those originating from the external justice. All our efforts have not stopped some foreign jurisdictions from misinterpreting us, especially when it comes to building our countries and our continent. In fact, this applies to developing countries in general.

As far as Africa is concerned or Rwanda in particular, it’s not possible to tell whether what is applied is justice or politics – you cannot easily see the dividing line.

International justice, just like so many other things we have seen in the recent past, is used to define and determine how Africans should live their lives.

In English there is the saying about a carrot and a stick. Sometimes they give you a carrot but then later this carrot becomes a stick which they use to beat you up.

When international justice is applied to us, there is no carrot and stick. There is only stick; a political stick which they use to lead Africans in the direction of their choosing. One day they use international justice to lead you where they want, but another day they use aid.

They call it international justice, but there are no clear guidelines. This international justice is not used where there is injustice. Instead, they use it for their political interests.

Let me start with our neighbours in D.R. Congo. This region used to be called Congo-Belge-and-Ruanda-Urundi is if it was one country, remember. Some people still think it is still the same – it is not. The Rwanda of today is totally different from the Rwanda of Ruanda-Urundi-and-Congo-Belge.

Congolese victims of brutal Belgian rule: Part of DR Congo’s crisis today, has its roots in its unhappy colonial past.

Those who caused the current problems in Congo know themselves. They caused these problems in the past centuries. Now, strangely, they want Rwanda to be accountable for the existence of Rwandaphones in Congo. Those who took Rwandophones to the Congo should be the ones accountable for these problems. These Rwandaphones are persecuted every day. Yet the people who give us lessons about human rights keep quiet and condone what goes on. And they turn around and blame Rwanda for the problems of the Congo. They should bear responsibility for the problems.

The law of the jungle says: ‘You break it, you own it.’ But for them, it’s the other way round: ‘I will break it and make you own it.’ We are not going to own it. Even with these threats every day, threats of aid cuts, threats of whatever list you have, you are just dead wrong. We Rwandans are better off standing up to this boorish attitude. The attitude of the bullies must be challenged. That is what some of us live for. We are better off that way. We know that if we don’t, we will be terribly worse off.

Rwandans – if you don’t stand up for your dignity, you accept to be beaten with that stick I talked about earlier. When you accept to be bullied, you are worse off than rejecting abuse and fighting it. When you fight, you can live your own way, and get along with what you have. This is where our interest lies, not kneeling down for people who in the end will persecute us. When I see what Rwanda has gone through in the recent past, I look for the real justification for it and can’t find it. I hope some of you can find the reason for it and let us know so that we can get out of this. Rwandans need to question why the whole world keeps mentioning Rwanda when they are talking about problems in the D.R. Congo.

The other day I heard on the radio people saying: “You know, if Kagame stood up and said he is condemning this group, the donors could unfreeze the aid.” Really?

So, is that what they want? Kagame to denounce so and so, so that they can release the aid that Rwandans deserve? If I am to do it, I would first denounce those that caused the M23 to exist in first place. I would denounce the [Kinshasa] government that does not respect or work for its own citizens. I would denounce the international community that seems blind to what is happening, before I denounce anybody else. To me, M23, the Government of Congo, the international community, are all ideologically bankrupt because they cannot properly define a simple problem that they see. They keep running in circles. For over a decade, they’ve been running around and keep blaming Rwanda for the problems of the Congo. Why don’t they have courage to blame themselves and take part of the responsibility before anybody else will take the responsibility? What is this blackmail about?

Aid? There is no country in this world that receives aid and accounts for it better than Rwanda. There is none. So, I am not sure if these people who give us aid want us to develop. They give us aid and expect us to remain beggars. They give you aid so that you forever glorify them and depend on them. They keep using it as a tool of control and management.

Our new Rwanda must be different. And I will not stop telling my fellow brothers and sisters, Africans, to just wake up and know that wherever this happens, some of them invited it and are not ready to stand up to the challenge. They must get up and be ready to stand up to this challenge. They are better off that way and there is no alternative. Africans must refuse to be treated as nobodies.

These powerful countries create a court for Africans and call it “international”, when it is only for Africans. And it’s not necessarily for those who have done wrong. It’s for those who have disobeyed. They pretend and tell us that they are going to punish people who are involved in the recruitment of child soldiers but they don’t pursue those who kill children. There are people who kill, who rape, who do everything but these powerful countries just keep quiet about them. Is that how Africans should be? Is it what they want them to be?

So, it becomes a tool of control, of management. If you are killing your own people, if every day you are inciting people to kill other people, these powers will not show up. They will be quiet because, after all, to them there are some people who deserve to be killed. That’s what we are seeing across in the Congo.

DR Congo M23 rebels after they captured Goma recently: Are they ideologically bankrupt?

Some of you, members of this house, you probably will have visited those refugees as many others I know have. You follow what goes on in the Congo. One part, actually the main part, where crimes are committed in broad daylight, that’s none of their business. It’s okay because people who are being killed, who are being raped, maybe deserve it. And then they turn to the other part and say everything wrong that has happened in the Congo now has to have people who should be responsible – the so-called M23. People who are raped and killed in Kinshasa, M23 is blamed and Rwanda must condemn it. People killed in Kindu, in Uvira, wherever, M23 is responsible and Rwanda must condemn it. People who raped young girls who are in those refugee camps, it’s M23. Even now in the territory that is occupied by representatives of that international community [the UN peacekeeping force MONUSCO).

It even goes to Geneva, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights who says: “These are the worst criminals in that territory. They are raping......” Well, there is a bigger territory where worse things are happening. If that was happening, it does not cover up what is happening even in the hands of government, does not substitute for what needs to be done about crimes.

So, if I am to condemn; if you ask me to condemn people or to blame them for anything, I know where to start. I can't be like these people. This law of the Jungle, this persecution of people even at the international level is just unbecoming. It is unbecoming and they start mixing things that are completely unrelated. They say: “Freeze, freeze aid to Rwanda, suspend...” What is the connection? This injustice does not make us compliant, it makes us defiant. I am not one of those who would be made to comply by means of injustice done to my people, to my country. I am one of those who will be openly defiant. On being defiant, count me on that.

DRC President Kabila: A wimp, or clueless in Kinshasa? (UN photo).

You can have your day, you can cause suffering to my people. On that one, they are very good. You can have your day. But to make Rwandans compliant because of that or on that basis will be very, very difficult. I know I am speaking for Rwandans. I know I am speaking for Africans, many of who will not stand and say it. If I am wrong and mistaken; if I am not speaking on behalf of you Rwandans; if I am not speaking on behalf of Africans and you are not of the same view as me, ask me to step down and I will not hesitate to do so right away.

This injustice cannot and should not be tolerated. And these people who created injustices here and who have created injustices for this region and for our neighbours cannot stand there and give me lectures about anything. They cannot. They are free to go and do anything they want. I know they are capable of doing wrong things… On that one they are very good, so they are free.

We are doing our best. We are trying our best to take this country forward, to unite our people, to give them a decent living like those people have. But they think we don’t deserve it. They think we don’t deserve the same development, the same value as they have. Why would anybody accept that?

Why should you Rwandans ever accept it? Why? The only crime we have committed is to be trying our best to be decently making progress. That’s a crime! Let me tell you: No, it cannot happen. It should not happen. It should not be allowed. It should not be accepted. Let us continue to do what we can do. Those insults thrown upon us every day, you ignore them. Don’t even accept to put these unhappy faces on because they will think they have got where they wanted you. Just let us continue doing our best and let us not accept to be provoked. Let us remain balanced. Let us keep mastering our art of getting the most out of the very little we have in our hands. Let us also try and continue to be decent people. Some of these insults and injustices, everything, happen because of mainly two reasons.

One reason is that some Africans also continue to make horrible mistakes, and of course, that makes for a good excuse for people to come in and make it worse for you, not any better.

The other reason is our weaknesses in terms of institutions and our own lack of integrity. We fail to focus on how to deal with our problems ourselves or at least to take the lead in resolving our problems. So they go through that. Those are cracks through which they will come in and cause you worse problems.

All these pretexts come about because some people in Africa make mistakes that they shouldn’t make. People who don’t govern their people and represent their interests in the way they should and end up attracting attention and give people loopholes and excuses to come and mess them up. They will use that to say: “you see, this is how Africans are…”

Rwanda Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo: An often-scrappy defender of Kigali (New Times).

There is also the failure to create institutions, because of the mistakes I mentioned, and end up attracting these people who come with the excuses of helping to solve our problems. Fellow Rwandans, you should not accept to be victims. Never put yourself in a vulnerable position because no one will get you out.

Of course, there are good people out there who understand how things should be, but sometimes we find ourselves getting caught in the crossfire of political wars.

Honestly, some of these things are done to us because people can just do it; they don’t have to have justification, no. First of all they are the law unto themselves. They consider themselves as the law and what they say or want is what should be done. They even influence international justice institutions to do their bidding and this is how international justice ends up being politicised. There is no respect for justice. When you don’t respect the law, why do you expect others to do so?

Look at the issue of aid. There have been many agreements on aid, signed in different places; there is Busan, Cotonou; the Abuja treaty, Lagos….. What else? We are not short of places and agreements signed for aid disbursement. But if you ever were deceived that the other party respects you or the agreements, then you are mistaken. They have not even the courtesy to tell you. You just hear on radio that they’ve cut aid or read it in newspapers. No courtesy because they owe you nothing. May be that’s right. They really don’t owe us anything after all, do they?

But why would you deceive people and say we have an agreement and this is how we are going to conduct business, and the other party disowns the agreement as and when they want? They don’t even have to have a good reason, they don’t. That shows how much contempt these people have for us. This shows how much contempt and arrogance they regard us all with. If there was an understanding that they owe us nothing, I would endorse that 100% because it’s true. The problem is that they say they are assisting us but there is lack of consistence.

We are told that they are pursuing their interests but you are left wondering sometimes how we have stood in the way to stop them from pursuing their interests. It is difficult to understand what they really want. We have never questioned or stopped anyone from taking Congo’s wealth because it’s not even our business. However, you will hear the same people turn around and accuse Rwanda of progressing because of Congo’s wealth. How can this happen if the wealth cannot make the Congolese who own the wealth progress? What is saddening is that even the Congolese themselves will join the chorus about Rwanda progressing because of their wealth. Why won’t they use their wealth to develop their country? How can wealth benefit others and not those who possess it?

The only external wealth that I acknowledge to have helped Rwanda progress is the aid that is given to us and taken away as those who give it wish. We are always courteous enough to register our appreciations to those who assist us. However, there are those who give you assistance and want to control and follow you up to show you how you should use the assistance. What culture is this? I think this is too much contempt and arrogance. This cannot happen in a society that values its culture.

Rwanda dancers: Called to pride and defiance.

People who have power, and have a lot of it for that matter, should also be wise. They should wisely exercise that power. Why do you have power and go tramping on people who are powerless? When the powerful get angry, it’s not justified. But many times the powerless have a lot of justifications to be angry.

The weak, the poor, the powerless have a different potential that they should use correctly to get out of this kind of position we find ourselves in every time. There is another kind of power that we have and should use. The power of being right. The power of being correct. The power of refusing injustice. So, you will keep hearing from me on this. That is why you hired me, Rwandans. I would be happy that some of you or all of you should be thinking about how we continue with this attitude of according ourselves dignity.

Even after me, we should have somebody who continues on the same path. In fact, this should be the qualification for the one who will step in my position. It should be that and nothing else: to fight for Rwandans so as to have what they deserve and that is no less than dignity. Agaciro – the dignity that we have. Only people who can continue to give that dignity to Rwanda are the people who should lead Abanyarwanda!

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The “Door of No Return” on Goree Island.

Goree Island, Senegal: The former slave outpost of Goree Island is a troubling place. From here, over one million slaves were shipped to the Americas over a period of nearly 200 years.

The slave trade itself lasted longer, nearly 350 years, during which time it’s estimated that nearly 25 million slaves were shipped from Africa. A shocking 6 million of them died on the journey. Scholars of the African slave trade estimate that roughly 6.3 million slaves were shipped from West Africa. The rest came mostly from Central and Southern Africa.

When Daily Nation (Kenya) journalist Joy Wanja visited Goree in 2009, Mr Eloi Coly, a curator at the museum, told that her that if were not for the slave trade, Africa’s population today would be equal to China’s!

For me it was mostly what I heard, rather than what I saw, that messed with my head. The famous “Door of No Return” didn’t evoke as much emotion as the tiny cells at the “Slave House”, now a museum, where hundreds were packed. A guide told us that when Nelson Mandela, who was detained for 27-years by the apartheid regime, visited Goree he went into the punishment cell. It is probably about 2.5 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 4.5 feet long. He crouched there for 5 minutes, and when he emerged, his face was drenched in tears.

In one part of the Slave House where the women were held, they would see their husbands being led off to the ship where they would be taken to the US; their children taken to Latin America; and then the women shipped to slave in the sugarcane fields of Cuba.

The European slave traders had a kind of “breast test”. The girls and young women with firm breasts were kept in a cell in the centre of the slave house. Directly above it were the quarters of the European slave traders.

Re-enactment of a slave ship. Six million African slaves died on the journey to the Americas.

In the evening, they would come to the cells, check out the breasts, the face, and rear, and make their pick. “They would have sex with the girls the whole night”, the guide said, nonchalantly. He had told this story for 17 years; he could afford to be deadpan.

When the women became pregnant, they were given freedom to walk around the yard – and many were freed after giving birth. If ever we needed evidence that there was a time when the paternal instinct was quite strong, there we have it.

Those were, unsurprisingly, sexually very repressed times. Thus the male slaves, could not benefit similarly from the amorous attentions of gay slave “masters”. Anyhow, “slave sex” imprinted itself on Senegal. You have this extreme of very tall, muscular, very dark Senegalese (the “original” resilient item) on one hand, and half-white Senegalese (Creole) medium-sized ones on the other.

And then there are the moments of shame; the details of the story of the slave industry many of us Africans find difficult to come to terms with: Once word spread that there were goodies to be got for capturing and selling slaves to the Europeans, the traders themselves no longer had to mount slave-raiding expeditions into the interior. African chiefs and other entrepreneurs brought the slaves to them.

A strong healthy male, broad chest, with all teeth intact, was worth a rifle. If he was scrawny, he was fattened until he reached at least 60 kilogrammes. A nubile female slave was sold for a well-seasoned bottle of wine. A child, well, was sold for a mirror.

There is an uncomfortable air around Goree today. The place has lost quite a bit of its solemn aura, in part because of the handicraft markets and the vendors who pester you as you walk along the narrow alleys. The crass commercialism simply cheapens the place.

In a rich illustration of today’s Africans’ attitudes towards slave history; former French First Lady Danielle Mitterand (with husband Francois in photo) paid for the renovation of the “slave house” and museum in Goree.

Then, one of the most depressing things I heard on the island came from the guide. When we were in the slave house, he chastised some in our party for being noisy and not showing sufficient respect to the memory of the place. Then he proceeded to tell us that the slave house museum was very decrepit some years ago, and it looked the way it did because it was “renovated by the wife of former French First Lady Danielle Mitterrand”. Danielle died in November 2011.

This was pathetic, because from just one week’s collections from tourism, the Senegalese government could have rehabilitated the slave house. Instead, it took a former European First Lady to intervene and save the place! Like other Africans, when it comes to things like these, not all of the modern generation of Senegalese politicians cares too much about this slave thing despite the fact that Goree is a big source of tourist dollars for the country.

As the ferry from the mainland docks at Goree, it is followed by dozens of children swimming alongside it. At first I thought they were just happy children cooling off in the water and having fun with the ferry. Quickly, I realised that they were not.

They were, to but it rather bluntly, “aquatic beggars”. The tourists throw them coins, and they dive deftly to the bottom to retrieve the prize. To coax the tourists in throwing down more change, the children do fancy dives. These kids can win world gold in swimming, I thought.

But their most innovative stroke is how they solved the problem of not being weighed down in water by pocketfuls of coins. They collect the coins in their cheeks, occasionally blowing them out into balloon shape to increase their floating abilities!

All the swimming skills, and the cheeks-full-of-coins tricks, were all to make begging more efficient and elegant. Probably because the slave trade seems too far ago, and the Senegalese have more important bread-and-butter concerns, Goree is just another piece of the fat of the land.

Things have come full circle; it is the Europeans and Americans who arrive in Goree weighed down with guilt and the shame about what their ancestors did, who wear sad and shocked faces. The African Americans, the survivors, bring pain and leave lots of tears behind.

They are loved by the tour guides, because when they are overwhelmed by emotion, they part with a lot of their dollars, partly because earthly belongings seem too pagan to hold on to when they confront the reality of how their journey to the Americas started.

We had paid our guide a fee. As we returned to the ferry for the trip back to Dakar, he cornered each of us separately to give him a “tip” on top of his fees. The man who had lectured us about the need to treat the slave house with respect, was changed. He had become a kind of feral beast, demanding his tip aggressively and rudely.

I don’t know how somberness (and nobility) can be restored to Goree. Perhaps close down the tourist markets and turn into a haven of scholarship of the African slave trade. Anyhow, I suspect that if the slaves returned today, they would hate everything about Goree – especially the people who sponge off its tragic history. Terrible things happened in that tiny island hundreds of years ago. Terrible things are happening there today.

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Nairobi is an unusual city. Every wealthy suburb has its own slum that provides cheap labour for gardening, housework, plumbing, and other services for the stately homes.

The diplomatic enclave of Gigiri, home to the UN Complex, US and other embassies; and the Runda and Rosslyn suburbs too have their slum – Githogoro. However, something disruptively beautiful is happening in Githogoro.

I am not one of those people who feel pity for the people who live in slums.  Yes, slums are poor, and sometimes desperate, places, but they are also dynamic, innovative, and an important transition toward being working class (and later middle class) in Africa.

These slums will shape the future of Africa. Not because their poor residents will stage a revolution and burn the city elite at the stakes, but as a result of the social waves happening there.

If you drive around Runda (or along the United Nations Avenue that cuts through the heart of Gigiri) on Sunday mornings, you see interesting things. There is a church on the edge of Runda that, after prayers, distributes food and, sometimes, used clothes to the poor people in the surrounding areas, most of them from Githogoro.

With their goodies, the children pour onto the roads in their hundreds as they head back to Githogoro. They are barefoot, many of them are unwashed, and their clothes are shabby. During the week, most of them go to Cheleta Primary School in the middle of Runda. They are a bit cleaned up, and look neater and shinier.

If you looked closely, you would see that the children don’t have any particular “typical” Kenyan looks. First, many of the little girls have long wavy hair, though it is unkempt. They are not light brown or very dark; most have an ebony-chocolate complexion. The boys tend to be tall and thin.

Clearly, the dating ways of the slums are not tribal. The poverty of the slums tends to level out ethnic rivalries that the middle class thrive on, and love across tribal lines seems to be common. These unions are producing very mixed “unKenyan” children  who don’t look

The Slum Drummers; they think outside the box.

your typical Kikuyu from Muranga, Luo from Bondo, and so on.

Also, several of these children are born from “illicit”  liaisons with the large western, Asian, and Arab expatriate and diplomatic class in the Gigiri-Runda-Rosslyn area, which explains the disproportionate number of “mixed-race” (or “zebra” to use the politically incorrect word) children one sees in Githogoro. Yet, Githogoro is not unusual.

In Kenya’s slums – Kibera, Mathare – or indeed in places like Kisenyi in Kampala you see the same thing.

A new more cosmopolitan culture is growing in these slums. And if one wants to see why, in Kenya at least, one only needs to watch Judy Kibinge’s incredible film “Peace Wanted Alive”, a documentary on the post-election violence of 2008 and how it played out in slums like Kibera and Mathare.

A friend who follows these trends tells me that; “nearly all the new music rhythms, dances moves, and the Sheng vocabulary in Nairobi are derived from the slums and working class housing estates”.

The slums rebels against the “reactionary forces” that inhibit the creation of new things that go against tradition, and allow the democratic infusion of new urban experiences into culture. These changes happen best in the slums because the Old Establishment does not exercise power there, he says.

Blankets and Wine as a favourite of Nairobi’s beautiful life when it was all the rage. (ItsJustKing’oriBlog)

And so the widest and most unlikely mixture of Kenyan, and also additions of “foreign seed”, to the republic’s genetic pool happens there.

As rural-urban migration continues and slums grow; as East African borders open and cross-border travel booms; and prostitution assumes a regional character; the original “native stock” in our countries will be diluted. The ancient ethnic animosities that bedevil African politics and public life will decline – or so it would appear to an optimist.

And new sounds (of groups like the Slum Drummers, who played at Queen Elizabeth’s 60^th anniversary gig in London), new imaginations, “new” peoples will emerge from that crazy mix and create an Africa that is brazenly outward looking.

Yet, to say that these shifts are happening only in the slums would be terribly misleading. In Kampala when I used to go to pick the kids from their school, the parents would gather at a vantage point where they hoped the children would see them.

Few ventured to go look for the children in the playgrounds or wherever they were in the school because of one difficulty. These children might have been born to parents from different parts of Uganda, and there were quite a few from Kenya and Tanzania; but the problem is that from afar, the children looked pretty much the same, and it was difficult to figure out which ones were yours. So a hunt for them in the playing fields would be very frustrating.

It is many years later. Last Friday I went to pick our daughter from her Nairobi school because they were breaking off for the Christmas holiday. It is an incredibly multinational school, and I tried looking at the kids to figure out which one was Kenyan, which ones Ugandan (there are about 12 Ugandans there), Tanzanian, which ones were West African, and which ones American or from the Caribbean.

Then I would turn to see which car they went to (you can figure out the countries by diplomatic plate numbers), or who their parents were (the rough ka-native thing can still be detected in us the parents, although it is largely absent in the children). I got them all wrong.

For the Middle Class, apart from intermarriage, there are even other factors at play. Grooming is erasing those “typical” ethnic features. These middle classes all shop from the same supermarkets and thus eat the same food. We are now entering the third full-generation of urban Africans.

We no longer need to eat “wild” sugarcane, and peel them with our teeth, or to eat raw mangoes from the bush, so our jaws and teeth are getting smaller, according to one account I read in The New Scientist. We no longer have to labour in the fields and handle the ox-plough, and thus our shoulders are getting smaller (if you want broad shoulders these days you join a gym). The women are having fewer children (two or three), so they are evolving smaller busts.

The middle class is becoming the food it eats, the shampoo it uses, the mineral water it drinks, and the clubs its members hang out at.

I have seen the future, and I love it. So let there be more Githogoros. And let there be more Gigiris, Lavingtons, and Westlands too.

•twitter@cobbo3

A montage from The East African.

There was a dramatic rush in the Kenyan capital Nairobi last Tuesday (December 4, 2012) to beat the deadline for registering coalitions for the March 4, 2013 General Election.When the dust settled, the rest of East Africa, which had been worrying itself to death about Kenya having another violent election as it did in 2007/2008 thus throwing the region over an economic cliff, had reason to breathe a little easier.

Not only did the sometimes shockingly cold-hearted Kenyan political deal-making remove the risk of violence, but long-term regional stability also got a lift from Ethiopia.

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s new Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn gave a hint that he might be more flexible than his predecessor, the late Meles Zenawi, when he said he was willing to hold talks with neighbour Eritrea.

Ethiopia fought a bloody border war with Eritrea that ended in 2000, with nearly 100,000 people dead. This would be the first time an Ethiopian leader held talks with Eritrea’s strongman Issaias Afeworki since the end of that war.

A Uganda soldier in AMISOM: Al Shabaab is beaten, for now, and things are quieting down in Somalia.

“The most important thing for us is to fight poverty … to have regional integration. If we can do that, it will be much more productive,” Hailemariam said in a statement Wednesday.

Not only will a return to a less hostile relationship between Addis Ababa and Asmara allow Ethiopia to pursue its increasingly deeper political ties with Kenya, it will improve the chances of securing the gains that the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, Amisom, made in helping stabilise the country.

Eritrea has been accused by Kenya, and more loudly by Ethiopia and the UN, of providing backing to Al Shabaab militants in Somalia, a charge Asmara denies.

For the region, then, with South Sudan and Sudan finally getting businesslike and agreeing on how to share the oil in the south and manage its export through the north; and the government of the DR Congo conceding to talks with the M23 rebels, the remaining possible party-wrecker of the next few months was the Kenya election.

Not only has the region has been biting its fingers over the possibility of violence, but beyond that the prospects for continuity of the generally pro-regional integration policies of President Mwai Kibaki.

The main key to preventing violence lay mostly with two men: Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru

Post-election violence in Kenya 2008.

Kenyatta, and former minister and wily political operator William Ruto.

The two men formally sealed a coalition, the Jubilee Coalition, bringing together Uhuru’s The National Alliance (TNA), and Ruto’s United Republican Party (URP). They were joined just as the curtain came down by Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi’s United Democratic Front (UDF).

Uhuru and Ruto were among the four Kenyans indicted by the International Criminal Court in January for their alleged role in the deadly 2008 violence, which killed nearly 1,400 people and displaced about 600,000.

Kenyan opinion is deeply divided about whether they should stand in the election or not, with the country’s economic establishment worrying that it will damage Kenya badly to have the president and his deputy, should the two men win, being tried for crimes against humanity while in office. Or, if they put on the kind of defiance that Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir has displayed, then Kenya would be slapped with sanctions and become a pariah state.

Now there is a glimmer of hope. The ICC ruled that Uhuru and Ruto had a case to answer for their

Great Lakes meeting in Kampala to try and end the renewed war in DR Congo.

alleged involvement on opposing sides of that violence — Ruto having led the Kalenjin Rift Valley attempted purge of Kikuyu from the region, and Uhuru the Kikuyu revenge fight-back.

Though the outcome of that was slaughter, the uncomfortable counter-narrative is that exactly for that reason, each of the men is seen as a leader of some kind of “native” liberation movement, and therefore a hero.

Their alliance, commentators argue, has significantly reduced a replay of the ethnic violence of 2008.

The other issue that would concern the region is if Uhuru were to run with Ruto as his running mate, win the election —and then be found guilty by the ICC. Kenya would then be led by two war criminals, who would probably not be able to travel far outside East Africa.

While Kenya would become a “leper” nation, life would not come to an end. Other East African countries would pick up the slack, in the way Uganda took advantage of the period of the ostracised Daniel arap Moi regime in the 1990s to become the regional economic star.

Uganda was pushed back into the shade by the freer and more innovative Kenya of the Kibaki years, and finally succumbed to its own orgy of corruption and rigged elections.

However, as the region’s largest economy, the collective damage to the East African Community of a Kenya under sanctions would be felt deeply. That said, recent examples have shown that the Kenyan political class is as shrewd as it is greedy and selfish.

With Mudavadi’s UDP joining the TNA/URP alliance, many believe it is a grand orchestration of a plan where he will be the presidential candidate with Ruto as his running mate, with Uhuru Kenyatta in the background as the grand puppet master.

Uhuru and Ruto would then deal with the ICC charges, and the TNA leader would step back into glory as a victim of an international conspiracy in 2018 to reclaim his crown.

However, it is a prospect many in TNA oppose. If a politician ever baked a cake, Uhuru baked TNA. Rarely has a new party been recreated so exclusively through the sweat and personal fortune of one man. The withdrawal symptoms would be massive if Uhuru were not to be the party’s flag bearer in March.

Whatever the case, Uhuru and Ruto have a rich opportunity to influence how their ICC trial plays out next year with this election.

Most of the violence in 2008 took place in the populous and fertile Rift Valley, where many Kikuyu people from Uhuru’s Central Province region have settled over the past three generations, acquired lots of land, and become successful farmers and entrepreneurs.

The Rift Valley folks have felt hard done by, alleging that they have been treated shabbily by the Kikuyu, and also that they acquired the land unfairly through the patronage of the first post-Independence government of Jomo Kenyatta, Uhuru’s father.

Kikwete and Kibaki: Kibaki seems to be dancing his way happily to the end of his term.

The source of Uhuru and Ruto’s political clout, are these competing realties. The ICC accusations against Ruto turned him into a hero among sections of the Kalenjin, who saw him as the fighter for their birthright. The accusation against Uhuru is that he masterminded revenge attacks mostly by Kikuyu militias. To the Kikuyu chased off their lands in Rift Valley, and those who survived the slaughter in 2008 though, Uhuru is a protector.

Now that the two have come together, they can work to avoid — or at least significantly reduce — any election violence in March, as they have said they will.

And this could be their ticket to walking free. If they succeed, and Uhuru gives up his presidential ambitions for the sake of less uncertain transition for Kenya, they will have created an environment in which it would be close to impossible to convict them at the ICC. There would be little support for it inside Kenya and East Africa, except among human-rights purists.

Exonerated, and having exhibited an act of selflessness rare in Kenya politics, Uhuru would go into the 2018 election with the election half-won. The next few weeks to nomination will be critical, but however briefly, there was a glimmer of hope last week that Kenya could dodge the bullet in March.

The second concern for East Africa, and internationally, about the next Kenyan poll is whether there will be a committed continuation of the Kibaki-era policies; especially in respect of economic integration and peace and security.

Kibaki has a detached professorial air, is not given to chest thumping, and has a bumbling way about him that often clouds just how much he delivers to the table.

Rwanda and Kenya are the only two East African Community nations to remove stringent work permit requirements and ease labour conditions and travel for all citizens from partner states (Rwanda has taken it a notch higher, and is scrapping all pre-arrival visa requirements for African nationals).

In the past few days, Kibaki has also managed to outdo even gung-ho East Africanist leaders like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. At the formal opening of the new EAC headquarters complex in Arusha, Tanzania, on November 28, Kibaki was very much in attendance. Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, were not, although they sent representatives.

Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete couldn’t miss it, of course, and Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza also attended. However, it must have been perhaps the only high-profile EAC event that Kibaki attended and Museveni and Kagame didn’t.

A few days later, Kibaki was in Mombasa to deal with a problem that has vexed countries like Uganda and Rwanda, which rely heavily on the port for their exports and imports. He presided over the groundbreaking ceremony of the Mombasa Port’s Second Container Terminal.

In Kampala and Kigali, officials and businessmen, driven to near-insanity by the inefficiencies at Mombasa, must have smiled and been thankful.

The port expansion is scheduled to end in 2015, and Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, and northern Tanzania, which depend on Mombasa, will be hoping that the next Kenyan president will have the obsession with building infrastructure (roads, ports, fibre optic lines et al) that Kibaki has shown.

Kibaki also broke Kenya out of its mould of concentrating only on using the country’s military for UN peacekeeping. In addition, Nairobi also traditionally restricted itself to peace efforts involving its neighbours — South Sudan, Somalia, Uganda. Lately though, Kenya has been active in the International Conference on the Great Lakes (ICGLR) Heads of State Summits to resolve the crisis caused by renewed rebellion in eastern DRC.

In ICGLR, it has been drawn into the murky waters of DRC for the first time. The ICGLR summit has recommended a neutral regional force for DRC. If that were to come to pass, Kenya — having lost its virginity when its sent its army into Somalia in October 2011 — will have to continue playing a critical role.

Will this activist foreign policy continue? On this, perhaps the evolving coalitions give the biggest assurance.

The coalition of Prime Minister and Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) leader Raila Odinga, Vice President and Wiper Movement leader Kalonzo
Musyoka, and Ford-Kenya leader and Trade Minister Moses Wetangula, brings a very solid foreign policy pedigree to the election arena.

There are other smaller parties in the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD), as they named their alliance.

The combined experience of Kalonzo’s many years as foreign minister and his role in both the early stages of the Sudan and Somalia peace process; and Wetangula’s more scrappy and militant tenure; plus PM Raila’s role in Somalia and the more controversial foray into both the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe troubles, is unassailable.

The Jubilee TNA ticket is weak on foreign policy, but it trumps CORD on its economic and pro-business credentials. Both Kenyatta and Mudavadi were former finance ministers. Uhuru was also born into and grew up in money, and has a sensible respect for business.

Ruto — like Raila — has lucrative businesses in Kenya and is believed to have a range of commercial interests in Uganda.

East African musicians Juliana and Keko: We will see more of these kinds of faces if Kenya can pull the region forward with its 2013 polls.

The NARC ticket of the more principled former justice minister and firebrand Martha Karua, which proposes to go it alone, is the one that is most ideologically different from the rest. It is left-of-centre, where the rest lean right, with a strong human-rights and civil-society linked agenda. If Karua were president, she would build a state closest to Kagame’s Rwanda, especially where it came to issues of matters like corruption.

The social media savvy Karua perhaps represents the face of the “new and future East Africa,” but whether the tide will swing enough in her favour waits to be seen.

Kenya National Congress leader Peter Kenneth and Party of Action chief Raphael Tuju represent the most youthful pact. Tuju was Kibaki’s foreign minister for a few years, but never had a chance to deal with the issues that Kalonzo and Wetangula grappled with at the head of Kenyan diplomacy.

However, beyond their youthfulness, they have not indicated that they will break dramatically with the old Kenyan establishment.

Apart from Narc-Kenya, then, the other platforms are very much status quo, and they are unlikely to alter the relations between Kenya and its EAC partners, or to move away from the increasing profile of the security agenda in regional politics.

CORD and Jubilee, for sure, will both just fatten the East African Old Boys Club, and that will give a lot of comfort to the lads Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kigali and the capitals of the wider East Africa.

(A slightly different version of this article was first published in The East African: http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/Shrewd-alliance-politics-now-calms-region-fears/-/2558/1639626/-/23jrkv/-/index.html).

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‘Ankole’ cattle in Uganda: Famous for its lean meat, hopeless when it comes to milk -but very much beloved.

TODAY  I visited with the good people of East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) in Nairobi, to talk about cows and milk in our neck of the woods.

Put briefly, EADD works with dairy farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda to help them be smarter and make more money.

As I sat with Moses Nyabila, EADD’s East Africa Regional Director and his colleague Ann Mbiriru, having black coffee and beating about the bush before going into the “big issues” that had taken me there, he mentioned that Kenya’s has 3.5 million cattle.

I wondered if that was too few or too many. He said they were too many. Kenya produces just over 400 million litres of milk a year, and my understanding (and my words here) was that with more efficient and scientific methods of production, it can reduce its cattle herd to 2 million AND STILL DOUBLE production to 800 million litres a year.

The bigger problem was not necessarily money or technology, Nyabila said, although these are important. It was culture. And the story illustrated not just the difficulty that modernisation of the dairy industry faces, but is perhaps the best illustration why sections of our societies resist democratic, and other reforms.

In cattle-keeping societies in Africa, prestige is often measured by the  number of animals a man (in these societies few women own cattle) has. A chap called Mwesige who has 1,000 is taken more seriously than a one Rugunda who has 100. Mwesige will have first pick for a wife in the village, and is several times more likely to be elected to the local council than his “cow-poor” peer Rugunda.

Herding cattle provides a whole right of passage for young people, and primes African macho values.

Assume Mwesige with 1,000 cattle is getting 500,000 litres of milk, and selling it for $20,000 a month, and decides to upgrade to higher-yielding varieties. He gets rid of his “inefficient” Zebu animals, and buys 100 Friesians that give him one million litres and he now makes $40,000 – twice his previous earnings. At the same time, Rugunda who used to own 100 Zebus buys more and now owns 200, and probably earns only $400. In market-rational economies, Mwesige will be considered to have prospered and to have made the better choice. Right?

Yes, and no. The village, in a deeply pastoralist community, will laugh at Mwesige. He will be considered to have lost his herd, to have “fallen on hard times”. Rugunda, on the other hand, will be considered to have flourished, and the village musicians will now sing his praises instead.

To complicate matters, if bride price is still being paid in the community, since it is absolute numbers that count, Mwesige’s ability to pony up bride price for his son will technically have diminished, although he has grown richer in real terms. Rugunda, well, now can more comfortably pay down his son’s bride price.

Because of the way prestige is allocated according to the size of the herd, there are few incentives for people like Mwesige to improve the quality of their animals. Shifting the premium pastoral communities put on quantity is a job of a generation.

But it gets more complicated. The main way young men grow up in such places is through herding cow. Not only does it keep them occupied, it is also central to several rites of passage, and ultimately to the kind of woman they marry and the land they get allocated.

On the face of it, women getting in the cow business might look innocent, but it is secretly subversive (ILRI photo).

The young man who tends the largest herd of cattle is on top of the food chain. If additionally he manages to fight off a lion or hyena trying to eat a calf, or repulse rustlers from the next hill, his star rises to incredible heights. Now he can marry the chief’s daughter, and when he moves to set up shop independently, he will be gifted with many more animals than the young man who has no heroic story.

Finally, and perhaps the real killer, is that moving to smaller herds – especially of Friesians (all the problems associated with adaptation notwithstanding) – means there is no need for brave young herdsmen, and reallocates quite a bit of the management of cattle to women. When have you ever seen a  traditional African man picking banana peels and feeding them to the cows behind the kitchen? That is women’s work in these traditional contexts.

That means that a lot, or some of, the power will shift into women’s hands as we have witnessed in rural areas with the death of “traditional cash crop” agriculture.

Who milks a cow, how much milk it produces, and who sells the milk is therefore a deeply subversive and disruptive issue. And many in our macho societies, will not let it happen without a fight…although it is a losing fight.

Think of politics, education, even things like mobile phone money transfer M-Pesa (that allowed women and young people to bank without their husbands’ or parents’ consent), all had to overcome these powerful, although sometimes invisible, social forces and prejudices.

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Obote’s “won” an election that turned into a poison chalice (AP photo).

One of the Elders associated with Nation Media Group (NMG) is extremely well-travelled and from all over the world he soaks in several lessons about media. His knowledge of the media business can be disarming.

In one meeting, he reflected on what he considered the “unfortunate” tendency that has invaded African media too, of filling newspapers with stories about celebrities, fashion, and all sorts of fads.

He said that fashion and celebrity in western media was “organic” and even necessary in a broad economic sense. The reason, he said, is that the west produces a lot of movies, music, and fashion, and that the sheer amount of the output required that the products be hyped, sold quickly, so as to make way for the next range of products.

Part of the reason for this product cycle has to do with the weather; you need to maximise your summer sales in the few months it is warm, because you won’t sale the same clothes in winter.

Likewise movie releases must be timed to coincide with seasons and events (Thanksgiving in the US when families visit big time and hang out together), and Christmas for the same reason, plus the fact that people in the west travel less over this period. A movie release during a holiday when most people with money have left New York or London to holiday in the tropics is not a smart idea.

He wondered whether fashion or celebrity news serves a similar function in African media. You can wear the same cotton shirt and shoes in Nairobi or Dakar throughout the year, so a shop can string out its stock throughout the year until it is sold without it going out of fashion in ways a London or New York store cannot do.

The Uganda army in training today: In the 1980s, the military, confronted with a rebellion, turned the streets into a terror zone.

I read that in the main market for English music releases – the US and UK – there are 50 albums released every week, each with an average of 12 songs – that is 2,500 music albums in a year, therefore about 30,000 songs. To get the public to pay attention to 30,000  songs they need a lot of press coverage. But to stand out in a race where 2,500 artistes are scrambling for sales, you need to do something that sets you apart – a sex scandal, a marriage that lasts one day, a bar fight, skimpy dress, tattoos, even a brush with the law that earns you a notorious weekend in the slammer is good publicity. And it is also necessary.

Now, Kampala and Nairobi together don’t produce 50 albums a year. Our most prolific musicians release, at a high, 5 songs a year each. In such a market, a musician doesn’t need to show up, like Rihanna, wearing torn jeans with her ass peeping through. It doesn’t give her a competitive advantage, so it is not necessary. And media coverage of our minor and major celebrities is useless – it does not sell products, in part because there are hardly any products to sell, so there is no pressure on shelf space. It is like wedding your wife every year; it won’t save a bad marriage.

For the African media, if you are purist and old school, this raises an old question: Do we really understand our societies and report them for what they really are, or do media ape the methods of other media in a disemboweled way without their economic, geographical, and social context?

This afternoon I took a cab across Nairobi. Freed from driving, as we crawled through the traffic

Fashion happens in a context: In a city where you have to run for life daily, you would die very quickly dressed in such a mini skirt and shoes.

jam, I could look at the citizens of Nairobi in their varieties. There were women wearing very tight pants and skirts, struggling to walk in their equally high shoes. The young men still wear butt britches (trousers that hang at the thighs and shoe the underwear), massive sneakers, and tight shirts.

To most of them, I presume, it is a fashion choice. And, I couldn’t agree more, it is their right right to look and feel good, and to attract the right attention.

Thinking back to the NMG elder’s theory, on the structural functionality of fashion, I thought of something else. The way people, especially the young “in-crowd” Africans dress, I thought, is really a political index about the changes that have happened in these countries. However, we don’t tell the story that way.

Let me explain. Uganda has had many difficult years in its life, and every one of its troubled – and indeed happy –eras has been marked by some peculiarities.

The period between 1981 and January 1986, was when now-President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army (NRA) were fighting their guerrilla war following the disputed December 1980 elections that were “won” by Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC).

The NRA had what was essentially an urban hit squad in Kampala called “Black Bombers”, led by Brig. (retired) Matiya Kyaligonza (Kyaligonza was Uganda’s High Commissioner to Kenya until about three years ago, when he was transferred to Burundi).

The role of the Black Bombers was to disrupt the Obote government, and show that it couldn’t bring stability. Their main job was to set off explosions, and to target notorious regime functionaries. The Obote government called the NRA and its operatives “bandits” and “terrorists”. The NRA supporters considered them “freedom fighters” and “liberators”.

What was not in dispute was the effect of the Black Bombers actions. Whenever bombs went off, the whole of Kampala would have people running in all directions like crazy. Women’s shoes would be left scattered on the streets; children would be separated from their parents in the mad rush; and people would even abandon their cars.

Apart from the fear of being hit by an explosion, the security services would swoop on the bomb sites and beat up and round up all people. The NRA so unhinged the Obote government that the army (the Uganda National Liberation Front, UNLF) instituted panda pari (get-on-the-truck) operations in which they would grab all the males from a suburb, make them lie in the sun in a playground, and bring NRA prisoners (often suspected collaborators who had been badly tortured), and ask them to view the panda gari victims and identify which ones of them were “rebel sympathisers”.

The young, cool, and restless party in Nairobi: Their dress is an index of political and security risk – if they had to hide their money under your shirt or conceal their cellphones under their belts, they wouldn’t wear vests. (ghettoradio.co.ke).

It was a straight forward human lottery, and the consequences of not identifying a rebel for the prisoners was dire—they would be tortured more in the night if they did not identify their quota of “terrorists”. So, to escape the pain, every prisoner would pick just anyone. My younger and brother and were seized in a dawn panda gari operation. Nearly 10 soldiers entered the house, and shot it. They dragged us away, having beaten our little sisters, and we went on to endured what today remains one of the worst days of my life.

I was pushed through the prisoner gauntlet first, shook the hands of about 10 “rebels” as I walked the line, and survived. Then I had to squat, with armed soldiers sticking guns to our heads, watching my younger brother also do the walk through the prisoners.

I became a man on that day, but I was so angry, some months had to leave the country before I could do something I would regret.

In typical fashion, though panda gari was a backward and cruel measure the army adopted against the Museveni rebels, the Museveni government itself happily continued the practice (especially in northern Uganda during the rebellion there).

The point is that in those times women could not wear the tight skirts and pants they do in Kampala today, because they had to be ready to run for dear life. And men could not wear butt britches and huge sneakers, even if they they had been in fashion then, for the same reason. They needed to run, and those trousers would have fallen to their knees and thrown them down.

The same things happened in neighbourhoods that were targeted by panda gari operations. People would jump through windows, over fences, and run. So both the men and women in Kampala then had to hightail it over walls, fences and open sewers to escape. You couldn’t do that in a tight mini or  backside-hugging trouser.

The UNLA soldiers were also a law unto themselves, raping and robbing at will. So people took to hiding their valuables under their clothes. Women needed roomy skirts and blouses for that, and the men hiding their wads of money in their socks or in a belt under the shirt, could not afford tight jeans or muscle t-shirts. They would be revealing their hidden money or possessions, and openly inviting the soldiers to rob or, even, kill them.

So, while Nairobi, Kampala and other cities have their crime issues, I think wearing a tight t-shirt or jeans means people are confident enough that they don’t have to hide their money in their underwear or under the shirt. For the women, fashion aside, showing lots of cleavage and wearing mini-skirts in most places in Nairobi, represents an assessment of how much a woman thinks she is at risk of being attacked by hooligans on the street for “showing too much”.

It is why young women at parties in Nairobi’s middle class neighbourhoods (which are safer) have greater freedom to show up in the strangest dresses, while their sisters in the tough parts of the city are more modest.

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Zimbabweans protest on The Strand – and get in the way of Kenyans’ beer and ugali.

I just had a very interesting thought:  One of the favourite drinking spots for Kenyan boys working in the City of London (or the “City”) is Zimbabwe House, no. 429 The Strand.

But we just call it “Uncle Bob’s”. The beer is cheap (at least 50% cheaper than in the High Street pubs) and there is Sadza (Sadza in Shona, isitshwala in isiNdebele, pap in South Africa, or nsima in the Chichewa language of Malawi, Ugali in East Africa, says Wikipedia). It is a cooked cornmeal that is the staple food in Zimbabwe and other parts of southern and eastern Africa. This food is cooked widely in other countries of the region.

The Sadza at “Uncle Bob’s” is served with pork chops, ox tail and “matumbo” (offals).

So no surprises when you hear Uncle Bob is very popular in the City. Long live Bob.

•••••••

This short note was sent to me by my worthy friend David (full name withheld) in the spirit of the Merry Season. I thought it would make for one of the winningest and pithiest blogs ever.

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Why can’t men just bite and cut their nails with penknives anymore?

For as long as I can remember, my daughters have denounced the state of my nails. They have accused them of “bringing shame” upon the family, and generally setting back human civilisation.

It is all because I have cut my nails much the same way like many distinguished blokes have done for millennia; by biting them, using my penknife, and the discarded nail cutters the girls in the house throw away as useless.

Then some time back my barber entered the fray; partly of course to get me to give the shop more business, but he also seemed to think my nails were generally letting men down. Every time I went for a haircut, there were many guys having their nails down.

Hard as it is might be to believe, I was once a fairly well regarded member of the Progressive Club. Those days I held firmly that things like manicure and pedicure were the height of  bourgeois decadence.

An aversion to manicure is one of the remnants I carry forward from that progressive period. Today, though, I decided to explore. The day was slow, and I had gone to chat with my barber and get a haircut while at it.

Business was also slow at the salon, so I agreed to give the manicure a try. The busty manicurist was a good-natured woman, although she showed enough cleavage to last me well into the New Year.

A manicure toolbox: Punch for punch, it rivals a dentist’s.

However, faced with such things, I resorted to a tactic perfected by my grandfather, that he passed on to his son (my father), and that my father in turned handed down to his children – the art of supercilious indifference. I just went through the manicure without in the least acknowledging the distractions that were two feet from my face.

Anyway, I was able to learn that manicure is a whole art and, even, “science” (in some countries you need a certificate to be a manicurist). My manicurist had more small buckets and tools than my dentist. And cleaning, filing, smoothing, and polishing a battered set of nails took longer than filling a cavity!

I flatly refused any varnish to give the nails a shine, I thought that would be taking the adventure too far.

I saw clearly that you just couldn’t walk out of the house and set up as a manicurist.

Some good came out of it. By the end I had respect for what manicurists do. Secondly, my nails were for the first not carrying around germs.

So will I go back? To the salon for a haircut, yes, but not for another manicure. I am afraid it will be back to the penknife and nail bite for me. My nails will not look elegant and I will continue to embarrass my daughters yes, but that is easier to live with than the guilt of having to pay someone to cut them.

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Meles: To some he was a villain, to others a hero and reformer.

One of the key events in Africa of the last 10 years, not just 2012, was the death of Ethiopia’s cerebral but iron-fisted Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Officially, Meles died on August 20, 2012, but his critics and enemies (and they are quite a few) believe he passed on early in July, but his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) hid that fact and kept his body in the freezer as it fought over the succession.

Meles was as admired as much he was loathed. He hated journalists, imprisoned them in record numbers, scorned and tormented the opposition, and those close to him – especially his wife the ambitious Azeb Mesfin – were accused of eye-popping corruption.

Meles was also a hero to many. He took over a dirt-poor country in which famines routinely killed hundreds of thousands, and engineered one of the most dramatic growths in agricultural production in Africa. Second to Rwanda, he presided over the second highest reversal in malaria prevalence on the continent. Well before countries like Kenya started making news for their big infrastructure projects, Meles had been there and done that.

Addis Ababa, the capital, was a dusty ramshackle place 25 years ago. When Meles was done with it, it was a modernish city, complete with jazz clubs, and a completely new skyline.

He pushed the largest expansion of energy production the continent has seen, and a country that once waited to be saved by maize from Kenya, was sealing deals to export electricity to it. By the start of 2011, in a story not reported much, Meles’ Ethiopia toppled Kenya from the perch it had occupied for over 50 years as the largest economy in Eastern Africa.

I spoke to several folks at the World Bank, African Development Bank, and some politicians in Africa who considered his death a “great loss” to the continent. After Thabo Mbeki was ousted as president of South Africa in 2008, many analysts believed that Meles was the only African leader who could sit in a G20 Summit, make an argument as good as anyone else’s in the room, and even win it. When people like South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma go to the G20 today, it’s because they lead big economies, otherwise they are “seat warmers”.  Meles, his fans say, went there because he was in the same intellectual league as the likes of US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. All these stories, however, have been told somewhere at sometime.

Underlying the complexity of the story of his rule, thousands turned up for Meles’ funeral – and there was genuine grief.

The official account by Addis is that Meles died of cancer. His enemies claim he succumbed to a different disease all together. Some claim Aids.

Strangely, little has been said about WHY he died. One of my Ethiopian friends, whose views I trust the most because he neither liked nor hated Meles and is quite thoughtful, brought this up when we met up in November.

“Meles didn’t die of cancer”, he said, “He worked himself to death”. Meles is known to have taken a proper holiday only once. He allegedly was so engrossed in work, he “didn’t just pay attention to what his body was telling him”, my friend said.I asked him why Meles worked so hard.

“I paid attention to many things about Meles that many observers didn’t, and I think his ultimate goal was to restore the glory of Ethiopian empire”, he said. In his view, while most people thought Meles was out to consolidate power for himself, his wife and comrades, there was also a part of him that felt a lot of pain about how far Ethiopia had fallen. “Meles was probably out to rewrite 500 years of Ethiopian history. It is a job that would kill anyone who tried it. And it killed him”, he said.

Maybe there is something to it. And to get a handle on this theory, it is just as well to go back to a 2009 blog on washingtoncitypaper.com.

Written by Tim Carman, it was entitled “Why Do Ethipians Eat So Much Raw Meat?” (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/10/02/why-do-ethiopians-eat-so-much-raw-meat)

“You likely know about kitfo, the finely chopped beef mixed with spiced Ethiopian butter and served with awaze or a berbere spice blend or fresh crumbled cheese…the Ethiopian restaurant at which you’ve ordered kitfo will serve it to you raw.

“Kitfo, of course, isn’t the only raw meat offered in Ethiopian cooking (or non-cooking). There’s also tere saga, sometimes known as kurt…

“I mention these two dishes as prelude to a question I hadn’t thought about until this week: Why do Ethiopians eat so much raw meat? The question was raised to me by Jabriel Ballentine, a native of the Virgin Islands…He knew the answer.

“He tells me that raw meat was a war-time invention in Ethiopia — or perhaps “necessity” is a better word, given that troops that cooked their meats were sniffed out by the enemy and slaughtered in their sleep. Ballentine said the troops finally learned it was the smell of roasting meats, and the smoke from their fires, that gave them away. Raw meat, then, was an act of self-preservation.

“Or at least it was a century or centuries ago. Ballentine couldn’t remember exactly which war inspired the raw-meat cuisine.”

When I was in Mogadishu last year in May, I was having coffee with a Somali who is steeped into the history of Ethiopia-Somalia conflicts.

The hungry and haggard were the international image of Ethiopia for decades. Meles thought a once-great empire could do better, and he changed that.

Ethiopia and Somalia fought many wars from the 1500s. Today, Ethiopia is the dominant opponent and is the proud owner of the Ogaden Province, once part of Somalia. Somalia meanwhile is weakened and withered by years of war, lawlessness, and hunger. It was not always this way, the Somali intellectual told me.

He spoke of Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi a 16^th-century Islamic leader idolised in Somali for his jihad against the Ethiopians. I hadn’t heard of him either, so I checked him out on Wikipedia. He mentioned other famous Somalis the rest of the world knows little to nothing about, and how they subdued the Ethiopians.

It was in these 16^th and early 17^th centuries Somali defeats of Ethiopians, that the Ethiopian revolutionaries hiding in the forests and mountains took to eating raw meat because the “feared” Somalis would detect smoke from any barbecue. His eyes literally lit up.

Ethiopia, and Meles in particular, he argued, took a very hardline toward Somalia, and would never allow it normalise, because they feared Mogadishu would raise an expedition to punish them for the “crimes” they have committed against Somalia the last 200 plus years. No one was going to subdue the Ethiopians so much, that they will have to begin eating else raw.

For some reason, there was something seductive in that argument.

The Ethiopian Empire, also known as Abyssinia, lasted from 1137 to 1975 when Hailemariam Mengistu overthrew the Emperor Haile Selassie, murdered the elderly monarch, stuffed his body in a hole, and instituted a reign of terror.

The glorious period of the Ethiopian empire came late, and no monarch symbolised it more than Emperor Menelik II. Born in 1844, Menelik died in 1913. The critical period of his rule was from 1889 to his death. He dramatically expanded the boundaries of the empire, modernised the state, and defeated the Italians, most famously at the Battle of Adwa (or Adowa) in 1896.

Emperor Menelik: Did Meles have a Menelik envy, and did he believe he could remake 500 years of Ethiopian history? Some think so.

Menelik, my buddy suggested, was Meles’ model. And in the things he did, and the role he played as an Africa’s voice in the world, he also privately sought to reinvent the domestic and internal prestige that Menelik enjoyed.

An incident from 2006 when we met him in Addis Ababa when I was part of a delegation of the Committee to Protect Journalists came to mind. The evening before the meeting, we stayed up late strategising on how to manage it.

It was a difficult debate we had, but in the end we agreed that to avoid an unproductive confrontation and end up leaving without any concessions from him on the over one dozen detained journalists, we would not throw things like the UN Human Rights Charter at Meles or lecture him about the need for press freedom. He obviously knew as much about those subjects as we did, so his government had made a deliberate decision to violate them. Rather, we would appeal to his pragmatism, and invoke the ideals of freedom that took him and his colleagues to the bush to fight the Mengistu regime.

Half-way through our meeting, Meles looked surprised that we had not yet lectured him on international law and such things, and realised we weren’t going to. He had spent hours preparing for this approach from us, and yet we were not giving him an opportunity to deploy his counter-attack.

At one point, he paused, and said; “Okay, I know you haven’t brought this up, but let me explain to you why Ethiopians get very upset when foreigners come here and lecture us about how should we should govern ourselves.”

He then plunged into over 600 years to explain why Ethiopians are proud people and how because of their great civilization, they don’t take kindly to people probably had nothing as glorious, trying to teach them about statecraft.

Our strategy paid off. We got more concessions than we had bargained for.

With the benefit of hindsight (thanks to my friend) I should have suspected that that was not just Meles talking. It was the reincarnation of Menelik. In the end though, Meles place in history, will not be as revered. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time. Meles died at the age of 57. However, age alone cannot explain it. Menelik died at the age of 69, only 12 years older. Maybe Meles departed glad that if nothing else, at least he gave it a shot.

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Kony: The Abominable One. Time running out for him?

Let’s remind ourselves. One of the big news stories of 2012 was “Kony 2012”, the short documentary video by the American children rights group Invisible Children. “Kony 2012”, which chronicled the atrocities of indicted Uganda war criminal and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader Joseph Kony, became the most viral video in history. It notched more than 100 million views within six days on YouTube.

It also kicked up a storm of controversy and, and inexplicably, virulent hatred against its producer Jason Russell, for the otherwise ordinary sin of “oversimplifying” the Kony story.

The publicity was so much, even US President Barack Obama said his daughters Malia and Sasha saw it and talked to him about it. At the height of “Kony 2012” fever end of March last year, some optimists bet that the outcome would be the capture of Kony by close of 2012. In any event, Obama sent 100 Special Forces troops to help the Uganda army (Uganda People’s Defence Force or UPDF) hunt for Kony in the vast expanse he roams and terrorises, stretching from the forests of Southern Sudan, to Chad, down through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and into the Central African Republic.

Little changed. There were rumours of sightings of Kony. Stories that he had been cornered, even killed. The UPDF claimed many times to have overrun his camp, but only captured his safari suits and shoes, after he allegedly escaped “seconds before the attack”. A few of his lieutenants have surrendered, been captured, or killed, but not the Abominable One himself.

Pol Pot: Kony’s kindred spirit.

So will they get Kony this year? If I may be flippant, if they don’t, then it might well be because of a South Korean musician called Psy. Some months ago he came along with a dance hit, “Gangman Style” and it became the biggest YouTube sensation ever, totally blowing “Kony 2012” out of the viral waters. By the beginning of 2013, it had entered the history books, having been viewed over 1 Billion times on YouTube! So perhaps Kony is lucky Psy distracted the Internet.

My own take is that Kony might well die in 2013, but it won’t be because some Ugandan crack troops and American Special Forces troops shot him. He might even be captured, but it will have nothing to do with the man-hunting skills of Kony’s foes.

Kony is more likely to end like that dreadful and murderous Cambodian Communist “revolutionary” leader Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge regime murdered nearly 3 million people.

That story has been well told and exhausted: In 1979 Pol Pot fled to the jungles of southwest Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge government collapsed. He and the Khmer Rouge operated near the border of Cambodia Thailand extracting from the rural folk just like Kony, until April 1998 when he died in the jungle. One account has it that Pol Pot died while under house arrest by a faction of the Khmer Rouge. Others that he committed suicide, yet others that he was poisoned. I read a dramatically rendered story about how he died, shaking violently with a massive malaria attack.

My reading is that Kony survives not because he is diabolically clever, but mostly because he has the advantage of operating in a space that the rest of us simply cannot comprehend. The result is that because most of the people who hunt him are highly skilled, but still regular, soldiers they cannot properly enter his mind. It’s therefore difficult to anticipate his moves.

His unusual brutal and gruesome terror tactics forced the Yoweri Museveni government to also adopt extreme measures, corralling nearly 1.6 million people in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in northern, and adopting aggressive tactics that made it impossible for it to win hearts in the region for 20 years. Kony had his rebels chop off the legs of people who were caught riding bicycles on days that were, according to his bizarre “10 Commandments”, considered to be the Sabbath. Peasants who squealed on the LRA were chopped up and cooked in village squares, or their lips and ears were lobbed off.

All manuals of revolution and rebellion will categorise some people as friends and potential allies, and others enemies. In Kony’s, everyone is an enemy. These manuals variously address how to recruit men and women into the ranks.

The LRA has no need for that. In its later years it relied on troops whom it initially abducted, and its “support” structure is comprised of female slaves and kidnapped children. Kony doesn’t operate in a zone. He operates way outside any.

With time, though, I think the UPDF better understands him and his methods, although he is still able to stay one step ahead. There is a small core of them who have been hunting him for over 10 years.

While he exhausted his enemies by forcing them to spend a lot of resources in a fruitless search for him over areas larger than Western Europe, he also put himself in a situation where he had to learn to adopt and operate in constantly changing foreign cultures and terrains. The problem is that Kony has not been renewing his ranks with shrewd young officers because he does not have the better-educated pool he used to abduct from in northern Uganda. Parts of South Sudan, eastern DRC, and CAR where he has been active are comparatively in the Stone Age.

In early 2012 “Kony 2012″ was the YouTube sensation. By the end Psy’s “Gangman Style” had knocked it into oblivion.

Also, while for nearly 10 years now the LRA has been operating transnationally, it has NOT become a multinational rebel movement, with Congolese, Sudanese, and CAR commanders. Increasingly, it has become a fish out of the water in the central African wild belt where it is active.

One of Kony’s most evil, but effective, ideas were the system of rewarding his officers with captured women. He tapped into men’s worst but most powerful instinct and desire. It seems to have earned him surprisingly deep loyalty from most of his officers who were benefitting from it.

However, it has now been many years, and today probably quite a few young soldiers in the LRA are Kony’s children, or those of his officers. And the women have transitioned from slaves, to bush wives of some sorts – mothers of their children.  Kony and his men can no longer control their camps with terror, or murder their children as easily as they could the ones they used to abduct and were not blood relations.

So one sees a few scenarios. First, his control over the LRA, or what still exists of it, can only slip. That means it might be easier to catch him out.

Secondly, though, the very opposite might happen. Because his children probably

President Obama and his daughters. They told him about Kony 2012.

surround him, Kony might well be enjoying more loyalty. They are likely to carry him deep into the jungles, where they will be isolated, but stick with him. It will be difficult to get out to find medicine for him, and he could be ravaged by malaria or one of the venereal diseases that it is alleged he is suffering from. Kony, therefore, could die lying bare chest under a tree on a mat, much like Pol Pot.

Or, as his pursuers close in on him, he might choose to go out on his terms—put a knife to his throat, or a gun to his head, and end it because he wants his family see him go out manfully. I will be surprised if one of those ends doesn’t arrive in less than 18 months.

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Narc-Kenya candidate Martha Karua: She “spoilt” a “good” story when her party held orderly primaries. (Nation photo)

The just-ended shambolic Kenyan nominations for the March 4 elections have earned the “leading” political parties; the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), The National Alliance (TNA), the United Republican (URP) etc. a lot of scorn and stick on social media and blogs.

They say no good deed goes unpunished, so it was that in the messy and often violent two days of the primaries on January 14 and 15 last week, Narc-Kenya was hardly mentioned in the media frenzy. Why? Because it had had very orderly primaries weeks back, with no fistfights, tear gas, burning tyres, and election officers playing Houdini. Narc-Kenya, you might say, was punished for getting it right.

Parties like TNA, considered to have a lock on Central but with little prospect in Nyanza and western, had quiet or no primaries in these parts of the country. Likewise, ODM, seen as having sewed up Nyanza and many parts of western, but feeble in Central Kenya, had very quiet or, in some cases, also no primaries in Central Kenya. Observers said it would have been a waste.

This led many to argue that “Kenya is more divided” today than at any point in its post-independence life, with parties carving out exclusive ethnic zones, tribal ghettos where “tribesmen and women” fanatically follow one of their own, and would murder or have no time for politicians from other communities.

Last year in March, leaders from the Mount Kenya grouping – the Gikuyu Embu and Meru Association (GEMA) – met in highly charged and much-reported meetings in Limuru.

GEMA has a controversial history, and critics see it as an anachronistic tribal association that seeks to further the political hegemony of the Mountain Kenya elite.

John Githongo: Cautioned about the seduction of oversimplistic narratives. (Nation photo)

Gadfly and former anti-czar John Githongo, a Kikuyu but not a fan of GEMA and a man who has his head fairly screwed on, weighed into the debate. In an article in The Star, he argued that Kikuyu voting patterns and political expression is not monolithic and is more complex than (simplistic) ordinary conversation presumes. Could Githongo be right?

A few weeks ago I made a new friend, a very smart chap from Homa Bay, a Luo who, on the surface, you would rush to say would be a fanatical supporter of ODM leader, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the “king” of Nyanza.

However, he took a “Githongoist” line. He said it was lazy to argue that Kikuyu are tribal and will always vote only for a Kikuyu. He gave the example of the charismatic Tom Mboya, a Luo, and Jomo Kenyatta’s  minister of Economic Planning and Development at the time of his assassination on July 5, 1969.

Mboya was the first Member of Parliament of Kamukunji constituency in Nairobi. Unlike today, Kamukunji then was what you would call a “Kikuyu constituency”. Though he acknowledged how

Tom Mboya: A Luo, was elected MP of predominantly Kikuyu Kamukunji constituency.

history, and the grievances brought about by betrayals had changed everything, my friend argued that it was “not impossible for Raila to win significant Kikuyu support”.

He said the Kikuyu could vote for Raila the way they did for Mboya. Raila’s problems in the Mount Kenya region, he said, were not that he was a Luo. It was that he was “not addressing Kikuyu’s fears”.

His arguments and those of Githongo inevitably lead us to several questions: What exactly does a tribal vote look like? When a Luo votes for a Luo can that only be a tribal vote?

I think part of the problem is that we have locked African political analysis in a situation where, whichever way you flip it, the conclusion is that we are tribal.

One source of this failing is the refusal to acknowledge that aspirations can coincidence perfectly with ethnic category. For example, a Kikuyu concerned about losing his land is less likely to trust a non-Kikuyu, and believe that his fellow Kikuyu neighbour, who is also afraid of losing his land, is more likely to protect their land. It is logical for him to vote his fellow Kikuyu purely out of enlightened self-interest. To an outsider, though, it is more likely to seem as a tribal vote.

How do you separate the legitimate vote over land, over the presumably illegitimate one for tribe? I don’t know. I would still hold that the substance, the primary reason, for that Kikuyu’s vote is land. However, in terms of public expression, the form it takes is a vote for someone from his tribe.

CORD men, Raila and running mate Kalonzo. If Raila was just a regional creature, he would be irrelevant in Kenya’s politics (Nation photo).

To accuse him of being “tribalistic” would be to confuse substance with form.

But there is even greater difficulty if one looks at the population of Kenya. Though they are the largest national group, the Kikuyu do not have anywhere near the numbers to win the presidency for one of their own without the vote from other ethnic groups.

Jomo Kenyatta would never have become president of Kenya with the Kikuyu vote alone. In the 2002 election, even if the whole of Kikuyuland had voted against President Mwai Kibaki, and for Uhuru Kenyatta, he would still have won.

Even Daniel arap Moi, in the elections of 1992 and 1997, wouldn’t have won with only the Kalenjin vote from the populous Rift Valley.

In 2007, though the election result was disputed and led too the murderous violence that killed nearly 1,400 people, Kibaki beat Raila by just about 232,000 votes. The important thing for me is that if Kibaki had got only the Kikuyu tribal vote, and Raila had received only the tribal Luo, and everyone else had voted for Kalonzo Musyoka, Kalonzo would have become president. Kibaki and Raila would have gone home to lick their wounds.

Jubilee chiefs Uhuru (in blue shirt) and running mate William Ruto (to his right): If you choose to focus on the geography of their support base, you will miss its substance (Nation photo).

Clearly, then, the Kikuyu vote did not deliver Kibaki the presidency, or allowed Raila to claim that he was robbed of victory. How do we explain in a country that is supposed to be virulently tribal, and in which no president has ever come from a tribe that alone could deliver him State House, other communities still vote for them anyway?

That is too complex a question, and it points to factors that are almost impossible to study and explain in a few years. Like the case with other African countries, faced with a question that is so hard to answer, like a river that will never climb a mountain, Kenya usually choose the easiest course – to  blame tribalism.

Tribalism makes political life easy. It allows you to choose who is a friend or ally. You are able to quickly identify the enemy – the “other tribe”. It allows you to decide whom to exclude when you are sharing scarce national resources. It is a greater way to build unquestioning loyalty. And it removes one of the things humans hate most – uncertainty. It is the easiest way to explain why you didn’t get that job.

For all its “beauty”, its powerful seduction, convenience, and the neatness it provides to analyse African societies, tribalism is a lie. It is voodoo political and social science.

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To maintain links to its roots as a rebel movement, even civilian government MPs traditionally are required to wear military uniform at their retreats. Uganda is stuck on the road to transitioning to a civilian democracy. (Uganda State House photo).

In the space of a few days last week, Uganda’s minister of Defence, Dr Crispus Kiyonga, and then President Yoweri Museveni, suggested that that if Parliament continues to give the  Executive headaches, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) might be tempted to step in and stage a military coup.

The outcome a military coup could be terrible, yes, but it’s happening would not be out of character in Uganda.

The surprising thing is that Museveni and Kiyonga acknowledged the possibility in the way they did. That is because it represents a sharp move away from the story on which the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and Museveni have justified their monopoly of power, and having the army represented in Parliament where they have 10 MPs.

The story is that the UPDF is the “People’s” army, and when as the National Resistance Army took up arms to fight the Milton Obote regime in 1982 as a rebel force, and thousands of peasants died in that war, it was to hand power back to the people. That is what made the NRA war a “revolution”.

Half-civilian president: In crisis or faced with opposition challenge, Museveni always jumps into his military fatigues and picks up a rifle. Here he visited landslide victims in Mbale in full combat garb and AK47.

That power was exercised through the Resistance Councils, later Local Councils at the lower levels; by the National Resistance Council, which later became Parliament at the national level; and the NRM leaders at the executive level. The UPDF’s place in Parliament was, as Museveni used to say, as the “eyes and ears” of the peasants and progressive intellectuals who lost their life in the cause.

For the UPDF to have to stage a coup, would mean the gulf between it and the “people’s organs” it brought into people to exercise power had grown so wide, it needed to break that social contract. In short, what Museveni and Kiyonga are saying is that the “revolution” is over. That is truly remarkable because it would be a formal break from the revolutionary history.

In reality, of course, the revolution ended 15 years ago, but the government maintained the narrative because it was a piece of fiction that still gave it some legitimacy.

Next question then, is why would a coup not be surprising? First, Uganda is a country where there has no leadership transition through the vote – all regime changes have been either through coups, or armed rebellion. It has only a post-independence history of changing government violently, and not a single case of democratic transfer of power. It is therefore more likely to revert to character.

Secondly, and more importantly, it is meaningless to brandish the threat of a coup to cow Parliament and critics, because the transition of power from the military to elected representatives in Uganda has been messy, and not happened as neatly as it has in Ghana, for example. It remains “unresolved business” and will have to come to a head one day.

Youthful and rebellious ruling party MP Gerald Karuhanga, has been a thorn in the side of the government – a problem the Big Men are pushing a draconian solution to deal with.

The NRM rules largely as a military party. A few days ago it ended its annual retreats of Parliamentarians and senior leaders. Like is the custom, the dress code at the retreat is military uniform for EVERYONE (except if you are too small or too big to find a fit).  President Museveni himself, every time he is faced with a crisis or his government is losing an argument to the Opposition, quickly jumps into his military fatigues, straps an AK47 across his chest, and stares them down.

Indeed some scholars have argued that Uganda didn’t democratise. That the NRA still rules as an armed movement, but did two things: It formed the UPDF to create a semblance of a conventional army; and dressed up the NRM rebel movement in civilian garb.

Which leads us to the next and last question; why did the NRM, and particularly Museveni, need to “civilianise”?

Because in this way, it can collect “democracy rent”. Every form of rule has its side benefits. An Idi Amin-type military dictatorship, or the “revolutionary” and one-party rule of the NRM had its pay-off. There was little bureaucracy, so things got done quickly.

If you got a contract, even you bribed for it, you would  be sure to do the job and collect on your inflated invoices. There were few, and even then embattled, independent media outlets to stick their nose in the story. And the courts did not have the “democratic” space that they fluked in the 1995 constitution to make independent rulings, so the possibility that you could go to court to challenge the awarding of a contract and get a fair judgement was nearly zero.

The annual Kampala Goat Race is a festival of hedonism and excess, made possible by the opening of social and a little political space: It would be messy if the land could be governed with a military regime that overthrows all of this (Jamila Hood’s World).

Unlike today with over 100 independent FM stations, TV channels and a Parliament where MPs defy the president, things were easier – even for the corrupt.

The problem is that in Africa (as opposed to Asia) donors, local and internal investors, don’t trust that system, so they put in less money, and you have lower private sector wealth created. This means the government collects fewer taxes, has less donor money, and therefore fewer resources for patronage.

Whereas a corrupt chap in the old regime had an easier time, he had little to steal. Democracy opened the money tap and brought big money (the democracy rent), but also intrusive journalists and independent MPs.

In the old regime, the government had to control people through a vast security mechanism, which it didn’t have enough money to pay for. With democratic rent, it can control the people through patronage. By sharing some of it with the security agencies, it gives them a subjective and selfish reason to protect the political order.

With a military coup, Museveni and NRM would lose the vast democratic rent. And the security establishment would have to base its loyalty to the state on ideology, not bread and wine. Uganda is a country where the grandchildren of the president have to be born abroad in some fancy European hospital, because as the Big Man said, he does not trust the country’s doctors.

It is a country where the lifestyle of the leaders needs the vast rent that its fledgling democracy produces, and they can no longer get the army to accept to “eat ideology”. It’s clear  - between maintaining a façade of democracy and reverting to military dictatorship – which is the sweeter and more rational deal for Museveni & Kiyonga Inc. – the latter.

Would they give still give it up? Yes. The great Greek writer Euripides said that “those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”. It was true in ancient Greece over 2,500 years ago. It is true in Uganda today.

-A shorter version of this article was first published in The Daily Monitor, Uganda at  http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/OpEdColumnists/CharlesOnyangoObbo/A-coup–democratic-rent–and-the-curse-of-Euripides-in-Uganda/-/878504/1672520/-/11bhr5gz/-/index.html.

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African refugees were the first true PanAfricanists and remain the continent’s leading accidental revolutionaries.

I think Binyavanga Wainaina settled one of the vexing questions about Africa: how to write about the continent (or not to write about it, for it is the same thing really) with his wonderful essay “How To Write About Africa”.

That still left unsettled a few other issues, especially the basic one; what is Africa, is it a continent of 54 countries, is it one huge geographical mass, is it a history, is it a consciousness, is two sub-continents – one Arab the other, well, Black Proper – or is it a cultural expression? Clever people; writers, economists, political scientists, aid workers, and other such folk are almost going to war over this. The politically correct position is that Africa is complex, and each of the countries is different, and it is wrong and simple-minded to overgeneralise. Yes, and No.

The answer as to whether Africa is one big country (a messy one at that), or several countries in a continent, some terrific, others hopeless, has been becoming to me slowly.

Our daughter used to attend a study group on the weekends along Ngong Road in Nairobi. I would drop her off, and park the car across the road nearby under some trees. I would sit there reading a book, news magazines, or working on my laptop – sometimes for four hours – as I waited. There is a small green park there, and on a couple of occasions I noticed that a group of young Ethiopians would arrive carrying plastic bags and sit around. They would open the bags and take out food and share it. By the time they were done, there would be over 20 of them. Then they would start playing a football game.

I got interested, and was told by mechanics nearby that they were Ethiopian refugees and exiles. Sometimes, I was told, Eritreans exiles also gathered at the spot. I wouldn’t have known that just by looking.

Then one Saturday I got the time for an appointment I had in central Nairobi terribly wrong, and turned out I had to wait for three hours.

Dictators like Idi Amin became a common African experience.

I decided to go and “pass time” at Nairobi’s St. Paul Church. I had family and friends who used to go there on Saturdays, and they told it was a “very modern” and short service. I got the time for that wrong too, but there was a service going on nonetheless. However, it was in French. Turns out it was the service for French-speaking Congolese, Burundians, and Rwandese who live in Nairobi as political exiles, economic refugees, or plain refugees.

I got immersed in trying to quantify the phenomenon of “micro-Africa” in Kenya, and found that they were many; Somalis from Somalia, Nigerians, Senegalese, Sudanese, Zimbabweans, name it.

I figured that one of the least understood and underreported shifts on the continent is this migration by Africans within Africa and how much they were changing the continent. They are dramatically breaking down the walls that used to make it possible to say that one African country was different from the next

African countries were indeed very different in the colonial period, and the 30 or so years after the 1960s independence period. Those were the days when, if you were calling Rwanda from Kenya, the international telephone was routed through London. It was quicker to fly to Bujumbura from Entebbe, in Uganda, by taking a Sabena flight to Brussels, and then from hop on another Sabena plane from Brussels to Bujumbura.

Some of this still happens. When I was in Dakar, Senegal, recently, a Mozambican editor friend arrived there one day late. Why? Because the quickest flight he could find to Dakar from Maputo was via Portugal, where he would also get his visa to Dakar!

Still, things were not always what they looked like. Slavery and colonialism, divided Africa, yes. However, in a perverse sort of way, they were also the first globalising forces on the continent. It brought Africa in contact with the rest of the world in a very painful way, but slavery and colonialism also became the first mass collective experiences for Africans.

However, the real Pan-African revolutionaries were the refugees. True, they were running away from murderous armies and warlords at home, but the Barundi refugees, for example, didn’t need to go through Brussels to come to Uganda. They took matters in their own hands, or rather legs, and hoofed it through forests, crossed rivers, ignored borders, until they found a safe valley in another country.

Refugees have a very different view of the countries they are passing through from those who arrive in

Fans at AfCon2013: Hard to imagine that when the first tournament was played, only three countries took part.

these same countries by plane. They also tend to have greater impact, because they do so at the retail level – imagine, for example, how much Somali refugees have changed the areas around the Dadaab camps in northern Kenya. They drink the local beer, date and marry the local villagers, and many times destroy the local environment. The latter is harmful, but it is still a serious footprint left behind.

I have met many Kenyans whose parents are Ugandans who lived in Kenya both as refugees and exiles in their tens of thousands in the 1970s and early 1980s. Nearly three out of five times, I have been able to figure out, despite their Kenyan names, and before they told me that they were partly of Ugandan parentage. It is this untouchable “thing” Africa that you will find increasingly many people sharing.

But more direct forces are contributing to turning Africa into one big country, and removing the old distinctions. Most of it is happening by accident.

One of them is football. When the African Cup of Nations was first played in 1957, there were only three participating countries. Today, it is huge and we Africans get emotionally entangled in it (although we don’t fill the stadium seats).

Today, there are many things you find in all corners of Africa – Nigerian films, Desperate Housewives, and the English Premier League (EPL). English Premier League, especially. Football loving Africans are united as fans or enemies of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, or Manchester City. While the EPL has a considering homogenising effect, it wouldn’t have happened without DSTv and the widespread phenomenon of the sport pub.

It is old in England, but the sports pub has not celebrated its 20^th birthday yet in Africa. England’s influence in Africa, and one of its more enduring effects, has happened long after the end of British Empire and colonialism – and has not needed a single soldier or bullet.

Matatu madness; an urban nightmare, but many Africans find it very familiar.

All this is before we take into account the role our corrupt and murderous generals plays in homologating Africa. Nearly 30 years of military dictatorship in Africa – except a few countries like Kenya, Botswana and Mauritius – again joined the African masses in common suffering. Famines too did the same.

A mad general in khakis in Nigeria, or an Idi Amin in Uganda, became instantly recognisable in Egypt or Guinea. A starving child in Niger, brought sad memories to a grandmother in  Ethiopia. These were not Africa’s proudest and best moments, but they were our moments, the chisels that made our collective history. Just like the joy of the Cup of Nations is a collective celebration, the tragedy of famine became in many ways a continent-wide bond of agony.

Lately, it has been the turn of Dubai to remake Africa. If you walk around Nairobi, you will see many shops – especially the fronts – shielded off and being been redone. When they re-open, they all look like the ones in downtown Dubai. And most of the goods are from downtown Dubai – or somewhere in China. They are doing the same in Kampala and Dakar. The shops off Cairo’s revolutionary Tahrir Square, were among the first to get this Dubai look in the early 1990s. I saw the same thing in Accra and in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, and Addis Ababa. People I ask from other African cities tell me this “Dubaisation” and “Shanghaisation” is happening in their cities too.

Soon, most shops in African cities will look like the shops in Dubai and Shanghai.

I can go on and on, and we will not mention the fashion and the ubiquitous braids, and the insane matatu or daladala minibuses. The short of it that if you live in an African city, there is little to nothing that will be unfamiliar to you to you anymore, no matter which other African city you go to. Africa is becoming one big – and largely unwieldy – country. It is not the united Africa Kwame Nkrumah dreamt of, or Muammar Gaddafi ranted about. It is the one the people have made for themselves.

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Kenya’s first presidential debate aired on Monday February 11. Reports say it was easily the most watched local TV event of recent years in Kenya.

I guess it would not have been a genuine Kenyan debate if, as it did, it didn’t linger a little long on the question of ethnicity/tribalism. But maybe that also gave it authenticity.

The twin sisters in “In My Genes”.

Ethnicity is also the staple of mainstream media, and the star of most discussions by the chattering classes on how political goods, including election fortunes, are distributed in Kenya.

To a non-Kenyan looking for a more nuanced view of the country, one of the more sophisticated alternatives to this view of a monochromatic and one-dimensional Kenya that is turned and flipped primarily by tribal passion, it can be found in three other growing media – film, photography, and graffiti. They offer a competing, albeit sometimes overly complex, narrative about what kind of Kenya will go to the polls on March 4.

A couple of documentaries and films come to mind. There is Lupita Nyong’o’s, “In My Genes”, about what it means to live with albinism in Kenya. Then there are two by the Maina Kiai and Lucy Hannan human rights outfit InformAction; “Disputed Fields”, which examines the legacy of the 2008 post-election violence (PEV) in the Rift Valley and the competing ancestral cultural claims and modern-day legal rights to land in the region.

More recently they debuted “Unfinished Business – In Central Kenya” about the forgotten and “invisible” people in the region who have lost out in the last 50 years when two of the country’s presidents were Kikuyus (who, according to the tribal logic of politics, should have taken care of their own but ignored the lowly masses in the region).

A scene from “Something Necessary” (Nation Media Group photo).

Judy Kibinge has been prolific, but her 2009 documentary “Peace Wanted Alive”, which largely focussed on how the poor in Nairobi’s Kibera and Mathare slums responded to the PEV, and her latest release “Something Necessary”. “Something Necessary” is an intimidate look at a family which is part of the clashing identities in Kenya that were unleashed by the PEV in the Rift Valley. And, of course, “Nairobi Half Life”, Tosh Gitonga’s gritty tale of urban crime, angst, and the political time bomb lurking under Nairobi’s wealthy surface.

In the last two years, Boniface Mwangi has thrown his photography in the fray, and more famously became godfather of Kenya’s socially conscious graffiti movement.

There is of course the Kenyan blogosphere and Kenyans on Twitter and Facebook. But here one sometimes sees a fringe and extreme Kenya that is too frightening to behold. Happily, it is too individualised to represent a mass trend.

Why do the stories told by mainstream media in Kenya – and other parts of Africa- differ so much from those that emerge from film, photography and graffiti?

Boniface Mwangi stands against his “subversive” grafitti painting he called “Vultures”.

Actually, the mainstream has a decent excuse; the immediacy and production cycle of daily news doesn’t allow us enough time for reflection. Also, by its nature it attracts spin-doctors and too many hacks that want to score quick political points as commentators on TV and columnists in newspapers.

The other production is structural. The best news media is mostly local, often appealing to core constituencies that are vested in a certain (often narrow) view of a country.

Films take longer, allowing many quiet moments of deep thought, and involve far more people than the most complex story newspaper or TV news will ever do.

While news is local, no film or documentary can expect to be successful by showing only at home. It needs to show in other parts of Africa, and enter many film festivals in Europe and North America for it to be a success and make a modest return on the investment that goes into them – and build a reputation for the directors.

That requires that the parochialism and gratuitous drama that makes local news stories a bit hit, have to be expunged. And the stereotypical narrative that might unnerve liberal global audiences has to be tempered. In addition, a good film or documentary must find a sub-theme in a local story that has universal resonance. Done well, by the end of it is a far better product than you will find in any TV news or newspaper.

On the face of it, most of the documentaries and films listed here have nothing in common. What, you might ask, does a documentary on land and cultural feuds in rural Rift Valley (Disputed Fields), have with an edgy crime drama in Nairobi (Nairobi Half Life), or graffiti on Koinange Street, which is famous for its night prostitutes?

Maina Kiai – a “troublemaker” who loves the uncomfortable and alternative about Kenya.

Actually, they do one thing in common; they speak to the question of what citizenship means in Kenya. If you a Kiisi woman, married to a Luo man, and have a son, he is a Luo-Kiisi, born into a tribe that doesn’t exist in Kenya. The most unambiguous way for him to make a claim is through citizenship, not as a member of a tribe.

If you are a Kikuyu who fled the Rift Valley in the election violence of 1992 and have been living in an IDP camp in Central Kenya (a theme in “Unfinished Business”), you have spent the last 10 years of it under a government by a president from the region who has not taken you out of the camp. You can no longer appear to your Kikuyuness, you cannot play the tribal card. With the ethnic card closed to you, your only way to restitution is by asserting your right as a Kenyan citizen. Maybe, in a surreal sort of way, President Mwai Kibaki might have done a lot of good for Kenyan nationalism by not making that issue his top priority.

And if you are a person with albinism, no matter your tribe, as “In My Genes” revealed, you are very likely face discrimination – no matter your tribe. Without the ethnic and other covers, the only way you can claim to belong in Kenya is via the route of a citizen.

When Mwangi does his graffiti, it is an in-your-face art. You can choose to buy a newspaper or watch a TV channel. But graffiti is along the street where you pass on the way to work every day and thus unavoidable. Therefore it has to arise to a higher standard. It must tell a story that Kenyans from all ethnic groups – and the “aliens” who live in Nairobi (that is what my Kenya government-issued foreigner ID calls folks like me) who pass in front of it accept as valid – or else it will be caricature, and be defaced quickly.

For all these reasons, and more, they tell the Kenyan story better.

The most important lesson I have learnt from having taken the time to watch all these art and media forms is that the rich and powerful don’t desperately need to leverage citizenship. They are doing just fine with or without it. Citizenship, it seems, is the final resort of the weak, the excluded, and the persecuted. The people, who benefit from our countries, are the ones who most need them to survive as united nations.

That revelation just blew my brains away.

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 A slightly shorter version of this article has been published in Daily Nation Feb. 14, 2013, as “As Elections Approach, Some Kenyans Struggle To Find Their Place In The Land” (http://elections.nation.co.ke/Blogs/-/1632026/1693048/-/10toshp/-/index.html)