The scourges of Kenya: from indifference to al Shabaab

(To Giampiero Venturi)
07/04/15

Kenya, among the many traits that describe it, has three characteristics that if taken together make it unique:

1) is in Africa

2) there is a semantic difference between the Kenyan and Kenyan words

3) borders on Somalia.

On the first point, in spite of the politically correct, we could talk for days. We limit ourselves to saying that in addition to being a distinctive feature, it is often also a problem common to 54 other states. This does not affect the privileged position of Kenya from a continental perspective. Let's avoid saying that it is the Switzerland of the Black Continent only because Briatore's sarong would be out of season in Zurich and because the chocolate is too caloric for the climate of the Equator.

But we can argue that for projections of development, infrastructure, education level and political stability, Kenya has for decades been a certainty in a regional context to say the least harrowing.

In the last hundred years many have exalted its suggestions: Karen Blixen with La mia Africa; Edoardo Vianello with the Watussi and Alligalli; tourists on safaris; Briatore and his friends with the villas in Malindi and Watamu ...

Kenya is one of the few African countries not to make the coup d'état a constitutional practice, guaranteeing an almost enviable institutional stability even to the often cross-eyed eyes of international observers. It will be for the money that comes with tourism; it will be for the Masai shield that stands on the flag and protects the nation from the evil eye, but we can venture that Kenya is better off than many other African colleagues.

On the second point we remember that Keniota is a noun and Kenyan is an adjective. At least for language purists, the first should define the inhabitants of Kenya, with the second everything else. Each reader then adjusts himself as he wants ...

The real problem is actually the undeniable geographic assumption that Kenya borders on Somalia. It is not a prejudice on the former Italian colony, but a pragmatic note.

Even with big efforts, we find it difficult to isolate a single advantage for Nairobi derived from territorial contiguity with the land administered by Mogadishu. "Administered" in a manner of speaking, of course. Even asylum children know that Somalia exists only on paper.

Since the end of the Ogaden War, when the Craxian Siad Barre competed for the Horn of Africa with Menghistu's Communist Ethiopia, Somalia has degraded to more like a shooting range than a sovereign state. From the warlords to the Islamic drift, the step was short. The first continental insurgencies in this sense were born right in East Africa: just think of the jihadist attacks on the American embassies in 98 in Kenya and Tanzania.

The process is the result of an ancient gestation, born on the cultural clash between Arab-Islamic and black-African matrix in existence for centuries: from Djibouti to the South, up to the Comoros, the whole east coast of Africa is a zip between two worlds in eternal contrast. Acceleration due to Black Hawk Down American 93 and the strong Muslim expansion in the range between the Equator and the Sahel, did the rest.

A stable country thus finds itself dealing with the remnants of the Somali civil war that exports fundamentalism and terror.

The massacre of Christians in Garissa is not accidental. The northeastern province of Kenya, of which Garissa is the chief town, is a majority Somali and Islamic, as well as very strong Muslim presences are endemic along the coast of the tourist villages.

Traveling from the hinterland to the ocean, churches, schools, houses and trucks on which symbols of Christian teaching stand out, gradually give way to mosques and writings praising Allah. Just take the highway between Nairobi and Mombasa from the town of Emali onwards to realize it. The closer the sea gets, the more you can smell Islam. 

Stupendous of the fierce friction and of the homicidal madness seems a hypocrisy: Kenya has been in the trenches for years and everyone pretends not to know it.

What stuns if anything is the deafening indifference of the West in front of the genocide of Christians.

Indeed no. It is not surprising at all. To the mistakes made with arrogance in the early '90, when the end of the Cold War implied a reorganization of the balance even in Africa, demographic bole ready to explode, nothing is followed. The tour operators were more diligent than the chancelleries and the Horn of Africa was left to grow badly. Not even his strategic potential has managed to move the West from its squat masochism.

Now we collect what (not) has been done and the Christians, as it now happens everywhere in the world, pay for everyone.

Giampiero Venturi

(photo of the author)