Killing Your Neighbors: Friendship and Violence in Northern Kenya and Beyond

By Jon Holtzman

Neighboring communities who once lived together in peace have committed some of the most disturbing genocidal violence in recent decades: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda; or Sunni-versus-Shia violence in today’s Iraq. As these instances illustrate, lethal violence does not always come at the hands of outsiders or foreigners—it can come just as easily from someone who was once considered a friend.

Employing a multisited, multivocal approach to ethnography, Killing Your Neighbors examines how peaceful neighbors become involved in lethal violence. It engages with a set of interlocking case studies in northern Kenya, focusing on sometimes-peaceful, sometimes violent interactions between Samburu herders and neighboring groups, interweaving Samburu narratives of key violent events with the narratives of neighboring groups on the other side of the same encounters. The book is, on one hand, an ethnography of particular people in a particular place, vividly portraying the complex and confusing dynamics of interethnic violence through the lives, words and intimate experiences of individuals variously involved in and affected by these conflicts. At the same time, the book aims to use this particular case study to illustrate how the dynamics in northern Kenya provides comparative insights to well-known, compelling contexts of violence around the globe.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9780520965515

Jon Holtzman

Jon Holtzman is the author of Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya and Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota. He is Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University.

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KILLING YOUR NEIGHBORS

KILLING YOUR NEIGHBORS

Friendship and Violence in Northern Kenya and Beyond

Jon D. Holtzman

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by Jon D. Holtzman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Holtzman, Jon, author.

Title: Killing your neighbors : friendship and violence in northern Kenya and beyond / Jon D. Holtzman.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015352 (print) | LCCN 2016016942 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520291911 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520291928 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965515 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Samburu (African people)—Violence against--Kenya. | Samburu (African people)—Kenya--Social conditions. | Ethnic conflict—Kenya.

Classification: LCC DT433.545.S26 H645 2017 (print) | LCC DT433.545.S26 (ebook) | DDC 305.896/5—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015352

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Lengerded

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Being There, Being Friends, Being Uncertain

2. A Case of Testicles: Manufacturing Consent of an Ethnography of Lies?

3. Green Stomachs, Mau Mau, and the Government of Women

4. Killing the Sheik

5. Bad Friends and Good Enemies

6. Views on a Massacre: Government and the Making of Order and Disorder

7. War Stories

List of Videos Online

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For anyone who is more or less honest and has chosen the correct profession, anthropology is frequently something of a guilty pleasure. We weren’t conscripted into doing this, and I’ve also heard rumors about several careers that are arguably at least as lucrative, so chances are that we are anthropologists because we enjoy it. I feel extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to have the experiences I have had through anthropology and to be let into the lives of so many kind and generous people. We should never forget, however—least of all in a book centering on violence—that what we learn in anthropological fieldwork as an intellectual experience and what we get out of it as a personal experience are only possible because of the generosity of people whose circumstances are often less fortunate than our own, and in some cases exceptionally dire. We all hope that we are giving back in some way to the communities we work with, and that, moreover, our work as scholars is meaningful even in a small way by bringing to light knowledge and understanding that is relevant to the most serious issues of our time. But in honesty, even under such circumstances as the saddening events I encountered in the research for this book, the wonderful people whose lives have come together with mine through this and related projects made the fieldwork, for lack of a better word or set of words, really, really fun. Of course, writing the book that is the goal of these experiences can at times prove hard. Consequently, I aim to acknowledge those people who made the enjoyable parts all the more enjoyable and the hard parts at least a bit easier.

Foremost, I acknowledge the many in northern Kenya who not only helped me in overt ways, but whose company has made my research there something that I always wanted to do and always look forward to doing, today as much as any other day. With sadness, gratitude, and the absolutely fondest memories, I start with those who have passed before their time. First among these is Augustine K. Lengerded, one of my first research assistants from near the beginning of my doctoral research, a fantastic friend, a kind soul, one of the most enjoyable people to spend time with one will ever meet, and to whom this book is dedicated. Although he assisted me only with the earliest stages of this project, I have likely learned more about the Samburu from him than from any other individual. That I have also been lucky enough over the years to absorb at least some small measure of his inimitable gift of coaxing out a story and relating it to others has made an important mark on this book. The wit, gentle and ironic wisdom, and the brotherhood of Barnabas Lanyasunya are similarly missed. My gratitude goes, as well, to Musa Letuaa, Otan Lentiyo, Jason Lentiyo, my longtime neighbor Nancy, Damaris and other members of the Lepartinagat family, Lendoogi Lenogseek, Benson, Piringi, and many others I may regrettably overlook in writing these acknowledgments but who have made my years in Kenya more enjoyable and more memorable, and whose absence makes my continuing time there always bittersweet.

Sammy Letoole assisted me in many stages of this project, and his good cheer and eagerness to do whatever needed to be done was indispensable. My great friend, Lemujel Lekutaas, is an irreplaceable model for anyone aspiring to excel at being both a rascal and a sage. I can only hope that if I live as long as him I can become half as good at either. I have continuing gratitude to my longtime host in Loltulelei, Leanoi Lekeren, and the many members of his family who have welcomed me. Among the Pokot, there are no words to sufficiently express my appreciation for the friendship and the contributions of Simba Amarnguli. I am not sure what this book would have been without Simba, but it would have been much less than it is and the time doing the research for this book would have been less ridiculously fun. In Isiolo I thank the several families who hosted me at their camel camps in the countryside, and in town I note the invaluable assistance of Mr. Mombasa, particularly in introducing me to the surviving family of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who generously shared their accounts with me. Leshornai was indispensible in introducing me to L and helping me learn his side of the same events. In Nachola, Christopher and his family were kind and giving hosts on many occasions.

A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies provided principal funding for the research upon which this book is based. Additional funding came from a FRACAAF grant from Western Michigan University and some support for this project also came by way of a Collaborative Research Grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, submitted by Kyoko Nakamura. Indispensable background material was collected over the course of other projects in Samburu funded by two National Science Foundation Grants for Senior Research. In Kenya I am grateful to the Institute of African Studies of the University of Nairobi for affiliation during this project and for the permission of the Republic of Kenya to undertake this research.

To my colleagues, I offer the warmest and sincerest thanks to what has become another home away from home at Kyoto University, where I have been generously hosted numerous times at the Graduate School for African and South Asian Studies, and where much of the manuscript for this book was written as a visiting scholar. I note in particular the generosity and friendship of Professor Itaru Ohta and Kyoko Nakamura. Conversations with these and other colleagues there have been particularly useful in honing several sections of this book. Earlier versions of several chapters were presented at symposia at Kyoto University, as well as at an invited symposium at Hirosaki University hosted by my wonderful friend Toru Soga, and I appreciate the many useful comments in all of these forums. Elsewhere, Dick Werbner, apart from always being the cheerful and funny pal (see Lekutaas above), has offered useful insights in both formal and informal contexts. At Western Michigan University, my former chair, Robert Ulin, was indispensable in facilitating the release from teaching necessary for sustained periods of fieldwork, as well as being extremely supportive in other ways. Also at Western Michigan University, I note several colleagues and former colleagues, particularly Vincent Lyon-Callo, Laura Spielvogel, LouAnn Wurst, and Timothy Green, without whose interesting views on my work this book may have been completed less expeditiously than it has been.

Sundry acknowledgements:

Michael Karanja has been a good friend for many years now. His kindness, his wit, and his valiant attempts to keep my cars moving have all been greatly appreciated .

Sveva and her mother, Kuki Gallman, from time to time offered their assistance and insights, as well as the occasional opportunity to see what hospitality looks like on the other side of the fence.

Homer’s distant niece, old and sad before her time I dreamed, wanders silently behind some of these pages.

In the last book I acknowledged Katie Loldia as my most loyal companion from start to finish of that project. Sadly, this dog of dogs has not been seen in our world since early in the main research period for this book, except perhaps fleetingly in the petals of the apricot tree beneath which she now rests, in the few days between their bloom and when they are blown away in the first spring rain. Another dog has sat beside me through much of the writing, a wonderful dog, and fortunately not quite a good enough reader to notice and Envy that she is characterized here as another dog. I also previously acknowledged my car. There is another car, only slightly reliable but many times heavier when, as with its predecessor, a group of generous and random strangers is the only tonic for extricating it by unconventional means from some situation in which a vehicle was never designed to be: lifting it out of a swamp, guiding it across a precarious river, or pushing it up a slick clay slope on the other side with little traction and a failing engine. I extend particular gratitude and admiration to a group of twenty anonymous Turkana who with generosity and good cheer literally appeared out of an acacia thicket one day to do all these things.

My good friend Matt Paris may not realize it, but beyond the other things he may have inadvertently taught me, watching his knack for figuring out what is important to people and how to have a conversation with just about anyone about just about anything has made me a better anthropologist in general and specifically made this book better. He also very helpfully organized a Kalamazoo shooting session one day, which genuinely enhanced my understanding of how military-style weaponry actually works and was extremely helpful in my discussions of guns in this text.

LG once concluded our discussion with the resolution that the role of BS should generally be acknowledged. And so it should.

My parents, Jordan and Joyce Holtzman, have, as always, remained supportive of me and my work in many diffuse ways. I particularly acknowledge here the role of my father, who—sure the book would be a smash even if he wasn’t necessarily totally clear on what it was about—wouldn’t stop bugging me until it was done.

I thank again two of my anthropological mentors: my doctoral adviser, Conrad Kottak, and my undergraduate teacher, the late Phil Kilbride. The spirit with which each of these has done anthropology is something I continue to look up to and to aim for.

I cannot say enough about the support I have received from University of California Press. Reed Malcolm has been an incredibly organized, supportive, and attentive editor, and the comments of three reviewers have been extremely helpful in thinking through and honing issues in the book.

Finally I acknowledge Clare Rose Straight Holtzman and William S. Straight Holtzman, funny, bright, wonderful children and the finest of anthropological companions.

INTRODUCTION

It’s the people who were friends before who are enemies now, remarked Simba, my Pokot host in Ol Moran, northern Kenya. Almost bubbly at times, Simba’s playful manner made it easy to imagine that—instead of being a respected community leader of about forty—he was an overgrown ten-year-old, a sense only underlined by his tendencies as a ravenous snacker on roasted meat and half-liter bottles of Coca-Cola. Smiles often beamed across his chubby face, in response to our joking with one another, or on occasions when he play-acted hunting down one of his fellow Pokot neighbors, slowly stalking him in a grove, his AK-47 poised in hand. It was a game we found hilarious when he played it for my camera, yet our laughter was also unsettling, knowing that the Kalashnikov was fully loaded and carried by a man who was not just reputed to be an expert in its use, but whose stomach bore the marks of cuts by some accounts made to let blood in ritual purification after killing neighbors—or former neighbors, Samburu herders with whom I have long worked and with whom Simba once lived side by side. Indeed, I had heard about Simba before I met him. Lekeren, my longtime host in Samburu, inquired about my strange doings as I began to extend my research to the other side: the Pokot, with whom the Samburu had been at war since early 2006. He asked me if I had met someone named Simba, who lived near him before the war. We used to be great friends. He likes to talk and joke a lot, Lekeren explained. I heard he told people that he wants to kill me.

•     •     •

One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of violence—indeed, genocide—between groups who long lived together in relative peace: the ethnic cleansing that marked the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the genocide of eight hundred thousand Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, or Sunni-Shia violence in today’s Iraq. The horror of such events goes beyond the dehumanization that we construe as natural among enemies, amplified by war. It is a more incomprehensible dehumanization, which marks a sudden reversal from conditions of everyday intimacy—as in a 2005 massacre of ninety people near Marsabit in northern Kenya, where killing was not directed against strangers or enemies, but rather schoolchildren were called from their dormitories by name and gunned down with automatic weapons.

War no longer occurs predominantly between standing armies of official combatants on well-defined battlefields. This is most often emphasized in the popular imagination in the hyper-reality of nebulous notions such as a global war on terror, where anywhere may be a site of war and anyone may be a combatant or a victim. If this dizzying trope is the one most familiar to audiences in the Western world—frighteningly disorienting to those living on soil comfortably safe from the violence of foreign wars—the reality for many around the world is diametrically opposed to that. War, lethal violence, may not be a product of some faraway and unseen hand, irrespective of the role that global powers and forces play in its inception. Rather, it may be experienced at the hand of your neighbor, someone who before some unforeseen event was perhaps your friend.

This is illustrated perhaps most vividly in the events in Rwanda in 1994. Violence erupted following the death of the president in a likely assassination, and in a period of less than three months, members of the Hutu majority killed over eight hundred thousand members of the Tutsi minority (along with suspected Hutu sympathizers). What is shocking in many of these instances is the brutality inflicted on individuals and groups with whom—prior to some catalyzing moment—the perpetrators of violence had seemingly been on good terms, as neighbors, coworkers, even friends. Thus, it is difficult to comprehend the response of the Hutu church leader Elizaphan Ntakirutimana to the letter of several of his Tutsi pastors, which provides the title of Philip Gourevitch’s (1999) chilling book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed along with Our Families. In response to this call for help before an impending massacre, Ntakirutimana replied to his pastors, You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you, leaving them, their families, and hundreds of others to be massacred with machetes and farm implements.

Similar examples may be seen in other well-known and lesser-known cases throughout the world. Thus, for instance, the dissolution of Yugoslavia gave rise to violence among Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Kosovars who since the mid-twentieth century had lived as neighbors within a peaceful multiethnic state. Similar events characterize Sunni-Shiite violence in contemporary Iraq, where in the aftermath of the American invasion cities and neighborhoods were cleansed of neighbors of different Muslim religious sects who for generations had lived and interacted peacefully side by side. While every case has unique characteristics and varying accounts, the genocide of half a million communists or suspected communists in Indonesia in the 1960s may be read in similar terms, as may be a range of conflicts in Latin America, recent violence in East Timor, and the long-running civil war in Sri Lanka. While it would be wrong to diminish the central role that external forces (whether at the national or international level) played in fueling these eruptions of violence, in all instances people were killed by those who had been neighbors living in peaceful coexistence prior to these events.

Such a shift from neighbor to killer necessitates a process of dehumanization. One does not normally kill someone defined foremost as your neighbor; that would be murder. To kill such a person requires a cultural shift to put him or her into some other category, a category less human. One way to approach this question is to consider what has sometimes been seen as a cross-cultural aspect of morality, the prohibition on murder. That is, all societies construe murder as bad. Yet societies do not agree on what murder is. Most societies allow, condone, or even encourage killing under some circumstances; hence, murder is killing that occurs in the absence of those validating or even valorizing circumstances. A hypothetical example would be a young man from Texas who enlists in the military and is sent to Afghanistan. There he kills many Taliban fighters, so effectively in fact that he is awarded a medal for valor. Later he leaves the military and goes back to his hometown, where—perhaps suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—he kills a woman on the street. Where his earlier killing was part of war and culturally validated, this new killing is culturally wrong. He is arrested and condemned to death. His execution is also killing, but it is not murder.

Clearly the circumstances surrounding these various killings are quite different, leading to disparate cultural definitions. There are typically people that society says you may kill and those that society says you may not. What is important in killings between intimates—friends, neighbors, partners in economic activities—is that they involve a shift from defining these people as those you should not kill to those you may kill, or even should kill. Here I examine the process through which peaceful neighbors are transformed into perpetrators and victims of lethal violence—that is, how neighbors and friends become killers of one another.

To examine this process, I take as a case study patterns of violence and peace between Kenyan Samburu herders (Spencer 1965; Straight 2006; Holtzman 2009) and several neighboring groups with whom they oscillate between peaceful cooperation and lethal violence, principally Kikuyu agriculturalists, ethnic Somalis, and pastoralist Turkana and Pokot. This case differs from many of the above-mentioned examples in key ways, but also shares key aspects that help illuminate this broader process. The wars of the Samburu and their neighbors have thankfully never reached the level of genocide or ethnic cleansing that these other examples have. Yet, perhaps even more than these other examples, lethal violence has arisen between Samburu and their intimates—friends, neighbors, and economic partners, who are people you normally should not kill. All the groups with whom the Samburu regularly fight are also groups with whom they are more often than not on friendly terms, herding their livestock together, intermingling, intermarrying, and sometimes forming close personal friendships. Then, at some moment, friction arises—whether because of theft of livestock, competition over grazing, or other problems—and these relationships become transformed into lethal ones.

I argue here that this transformation is a cultural and historical process rather than simply a material or political event. It requires the recategorization of persons, remaking your neighbors as people who can or should be killed. While some amount of friction occurs regularly, even in the best of times—someone’s cow gets lost and it is suspected that it was stolen, there is an incident of small-scale theft, or someone murders someone from the other group—it does not always escalate into widespread violence. What I aim to illustrate here is how this recategorization is part of a system of meanings. Specifically, the seeds of violence exist in the understandings or misunderstandings of the opposing group, which are often products of past violence, catalyzed into lethal conflict by some event or series of events. War is given meaning by its participants. There are causes that justify it and explain it. And there are effects that its participants aim for. These are typically not just the obvious material goal of killing enemies. Those engaged in war are communicating things to their own people, such that lethal acts become logical outcomes within the cultural discourse that drives the war. At the same time violence—its patterns, its forms—conveys meanings to one’s opponents about the causes of war, its goals, and its rules of conduct. Thus, I suggest, we must look at violence not only in its technical aspects (the brutality of the killing) but also in the way it is driven by and conveys cultural meanings. Wars are the products of stories, and they create stories, stories that may have consequences for generations to come.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CULTURAL MEANINGS OF VIOLENCE

Violence is often construed as the antithesis of the social order (Rapport 2000; Sorel 1999; Daniel 1996; Nordstrom and Robben 1995; Abbink 2000). Recent scholars have, however, suggested that violence should be analyzed as part of a cultural system (George 2004; Steedly 1999), much like anthropologists have long interpreted art, religion, or economics (Geertz 1973). That is, much as Clausewitz saw war as a continuation of politics by other means, violence is in some ways an extreme form of communication, such that it must be understood within the systems of meaning that foment it, shape even its ghastliest forms, and serve as lenses for its interpretation (Whitehead 2004; Taylor 2004; Hinton 2004)—that is, violence is an extension of other aspects of a cultural system.

Since violence is by definition conflictual, the type of cultural system of which it is a part is different from many subjects of anthropological analysis. If in domains such as food or religion one would typically uncover relatively shared meanings, violence inherently involves agents whose interests and subject positions are radically at odds. Consequently, the cultural meanings of violence are always multiple and fragmented (Briggs 1996; Brenneis 1996). Yet, most important to this framework, they are also interlocking (Riches 1986; Stewart and Strathern 2002). On the one hand, varying sets of actors—victims, perpetrators, and observers, often shifting among these subject positions—operate under differing cultural logics that lead to violence and influence the ways victims construe and respond to it, and how varied sets of observers understand, explain, and respond to violence. At the same time, violent acts ultimately emerge as what Gluckman (1940) termed a social situation, a single event that crystallizes out of the intersection of the divergent visions of varyingly positioned actors, who will understand this shared event very differently and ultimately create disparate interpretations that will influence conditions including, but not limited to, peaceful and violent interactions in the future.

That differently positioned actors or groups explain violence in contrasting ways is not, of course, news. In all likelihood, every society that has ever warred with another has its own account of how and why it all started. As Brenneis (1996) points out in Briggs’s important volume on narrative in conflict: Nowhere is it more likely [than in conflicts] that there will be at least two sides to every story, neither of which can be taken as objective. The indeterminacy inherent in narrative representation may not be immediately evident in every context, but it cannot be avoided in cases of conflict (p. 42). Every society engaged in war views itself as justified in its actions; its warriors are heroes while its opponents are in one way or another to blame. Even in cases where a society might recognize its own aggression, actions can nonetheless be justified by virtue of past wrongs by their opponents, by the righteousness of their cause, or perhaps by the less than fully human stature attributed to their victims. Although, for instance, it is difficult to concoct a reading of North American history in which Europeans were not aggressors against the native peoples, this conquest was justified by ideology (e.g., Manifest Destiny) that made such a conquest both righteous and teleologically inevitable, while also painting their