The way Kenyan citizens are living out and working through their country’s crisis offers insight into how boundaries of ethnicity, clan and class can be overcome, writes the anthropologist Angelique Haugerud.
“We cannot stop life for the sake of two people who are not in agreement” said a twenty-three year old Kenyan woman in Nairobi. The two men in question – Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga – both claim to have been elected president in the national vote on 27 December 2007. The incumbent Kibaki was sworn into a second term of office, and Odinga publicly challenges the legitimacy of the vote count.
During their stand-off, more than 250,000 people have been displaced from their homes; police have shot and killed unarmed civilian protesters; vigilantes (some posing as traditional “warriors”) have prevented Red Cross food relief from reaching victims; police fired teargas into a hospital; and more than 650 people have died in violent conflicts, including some forty women and children who were incinerated in a church where they had taken refuge (on the background to some of these events, see Jeffrey Gettleman, “Signs in Kenya That Killings Were Planned,” New York Times, 21 January 2008). Food and fuel supplies have run short in Kenya and neighbouring countries.