For Money and Elders: Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya

By Robert W. Blunt

Many observers of Kenya’s complicated history see causes for concern, from the use of public office for private gain to a constitutional structure historically lopsided towards the executive branch. Yet efforts from critics and academics to diagnose the country’s problems do not often consider what these fiscal and political issues mean to ordinary Kenyans. How do Kenyans express their own political understanding, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from their leaders?
 
In For Money and Elders, Robert W. Blunt addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. He examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, he shows, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, Blunt explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226655895

Book preview

For Money and Elders

For Money and Elders

Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in Kenya

ROBERT W. BLUNT

The University of Chicago Press   •   Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65561-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65575-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65589-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226655895.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blunt, Robert W., author.

Title: For money and elders : ritual, sovereignty, and the sacred in Kenya / Robert W. Blunt.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019012197 | ISBN 9780226655611 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226655758 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226655895 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Kenya—Politics and government—20th century. | Kenya—Politics and government—21st century. | Kenya—Religion.

Classification: LCC DT433.575.B595 2019 | DDC 967.62/03—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012197

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

1   Introduction

2   Kenyatta’s Lament: The Transformation of Ritual Ideologies in Colonial Kenya

3   Inflationary Rituals: The Mau Mau Rebellion

4   Old Age and Money: The General Numismatics of Independent Kenya

5   Satan Is an Imitator: Kenya’s Recent Cosmology of Corruption

6   Corruptus Interruptus: The Limits of Transactional Imaginaries in Moi’s Kenya

7   (Not) Seeing Is Believing: Ethnicity, Trauma, and the Senses in Kenya’s 2007 Postelection Violence

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

1

Introduction

According to both international onlookers and many Kenyans, the election of Mwai Kibaki in 2003 was supposed to usher in a more stable and dependable government than that of his predecessor Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002). Kibaki united disparate parties under the banner of the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC), a clear distinction to the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the party that had been in power since independence. In what might be described as the least ethnic election in Kenya’s short history of multiparty politics (Kenya was a one-party state until the early 1990s), Kibaki defeated his fellow Kikuyu, Uhuru Kenyatta, whom Moi had handpicked as his successor on the basis of presenting a youth candidate.

It would turn out, however, that Kibaki’s coalition was glued together with fragile adhesives. Before his election, Kibaki had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with his key coalition partners to decentralize executive power in the drafting of a new constitution. The MOU included a power-sharing agreement with Raila Odinga, the powerful head of the Liberal Democratic Party, NARC’s most important coalition partner. Previous versions of the draft constitution had included legal provisions for both a president popularly elected by Kenyans and a prime minister elected by Kenya’s parliament. However, when Kenya’s attorney general, Amos Wako, presented the final version of the draft constitution to be voted on in the constitutional referendum of November 2005, it retained sweeping powers for the president. Kibaki’s coalition soon fragmented, and Odinga, under the new banner of ODM (Orange Democratic Movement),¹ led a successful revolt against what was supposed to be Kibaki’s crowning achievement, a new constitution. The constitutional referendum was soundly defeated.

Although Kibaki failed to introduce a new constitution retaining exceptional executive powers of the past (on paper anyway), he nonetheless further ratified what was arguably the main fait accompli of Moi’s government—the lifting of the state’s imprimatur from its official signs and processes while nonetheless continuing to perform a model of elderhood from which this imprimatur was popularly and tacitly held to emanate. After independence in 1963, Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, had fashioned himself into the Mzee (the Kiswahili honorific for old man), both the generative father of the nation and the ultimate guarantor of Kenya’s development-oriented modernity. Fast forward to the period beginning in the 1980s until the end of KANU rule in 2002. During this period, Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, initiated a new era of ruse and dissimulation catalyzed by conditions of scarcity instigated by the rise of neoliberalism and Kenya’s changing post–Cold War relationship to the United States and Britain. Under Moi, state performances of largesse certainly resembled the baroque rituals of Kenyatta’s robust patrimonial state, but their spectacular nature masked an ongoing liquidation of the commons. In this same vein, Kibaki inherited what would come to be called the Anglo-Leasing scandal from Moi’s KANU government.

Premised on the need to improve security and antifraud infrastructure, Anglo-Leasing Finance was a British company (along with several other similar firms), which had bid on these security-related tenders during the Moi era. New forensics labs, a brand-new passport verification system, and even naval ships were contracted for purchase by the Kenyan government. In the case of the passport system and forensic laboratories, a French company agreed to provide them for the sum of six million Euros. However, Anglo-Leasing Finance was awarded the contract for thirty million Euros even though they would eventually subcontract this work to the same French firm that had put in a bid of six million. Apart from ALF overcharging the Kenyan government by 500 percent, most of the infrastructure contracted for never materialized, and most of the companies involved in what was essentially a noncompetitive bidding process turned out to be a series of interlinked ghost companies connected to several key figures in Kibaki’s government (including, most notably, internal security minister Chris Murungaru and vice president Moody Awori). The contours of the Anglo-Leasing scandal mirrored those of the Moi era. Powerful state actors falsified the state’s imprimatur, effectively counterfeiting key official signs and processes at a cost to Kenyans of billions of shillings.

Critics of corruption and political scientists armed with rubrics for fragile states might look at the Kibaki regime and highlight a familiar litany of crimes: the use of public office for private gain, the attempt to maintain a constitutional structure lopsided toward the executive, and so on.² Yet such efforts to list failures of governance and fiscal management themselves fail to explain what these putative crimes mean to ordinary Kenyans. Such taxonomic and reductionist tendencies fail to inquire into the vocabularies, genres, and forms though which Kenyans express their own political understandings, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from the sovereigns they often refer to as "the wazee (Kiswahili for the old men").

In It’s Our Turn to Eat, Michela Wrong’s account of Kibaki’s former anticorruption czar John Githongo, she captures these continuities between the Moi and Kibaki eras through T. E. Lawrence’s own disillusionment with the architects of British Empire after the Arab revolt in 1916. Yet, when we achieved and the new world dawned the old man came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew . . . Youth could win but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age (Wrong 2009, xi). Yet it bears asking: what exactly was this world that the old man in Kenya sought to remake? And what exactly distinguishes old men as such? The answer to both these questions, I argue, is more complex than anything that the category of corruption can convey. It requires a shift of analytical attention to the more mundane forms of everyday life Kenyans inhabit.

Throughout the Moi era until the end of Kibaki’s rule, Kenyans certainly complained about a wide array of state and nonstate practices that they labeled corruption. But I argue that they were worried more about the corruption of meaning and the potential fragility of the authorities that are supposed to ground a stable relationship between signs and their referents. This book addresses this problem in detail. But to start, consider one of Kenya’s most visible and ubiquitous social institutions: the humble matatu. Matatus are commuter taxis—usually Nissan minivans—that ferry Kenyans and, importantly, their money, from home to work and from city to country (Mutongi 2017). As will become clearer below, its close association with money—as both a medium of exchange and a repository of social meaning—makes the matatu a prism through we can begin to view problems of meaning, value, and the gender of sovereignty in Kenya’s patrimonial symbolic economy.

Mungiki

As the circulatory system of the nation, matatus have, not surprisingly, been a particularly dense site for rent-seeking³ activities from a variety of interested parties. In this regard, no group has been more famous in the unofficial taxation of matatu routes than the Mungiki sect. Kibaki cracked down on the movement a few weeks into his presidency in early 2003 for their illegal taxation of matatu routes, but Mungiki made an uncanny return to the public eye just as the Anglo-Leasing scandal was breaking.

For example, a headline from the October 15, 2005, edition of The Nation queried, Could This Be Mungiki’s Secret Den?⁴ After listing various criminal activities in and around Nairobi that Kenya’s police boss King’ori Mwangi attributed to Mungiki—murders, robberies, extortion, recent strikes by matatu workers—the article proceeded to describe alleged Mungiki literature and paraphernalia confiscated by the police in a raid on a suspected Mungiki headquarters. These items include cameras, receipt books, and hymn books and, counterintuitively for an organization known for its secrecy, membership certificates. Items that seemed to the police slightly more sect-like were cleansing oils and, more suspiciously, flags coloured white, yellow, green, red and black—hues associated with the sect. At the top of the article’s list of suspect religious materials, however, were a few traditional Kikuyu houses in this case built right next to a modern house and organized around what the author describes as a shrine. Oathing is done in an open space near a shrine, Mr. Mwangi states matter-of-factly. One Mr. Ombati, an investigative officer at the site, supplies further confirmation of the missing occupants’ suspect ritual activities, declaring that the home in question looks like a shrine.

The ritual activity ascribed to this shrine, that of oathing, is terrifying for many Kenyans, as it is believed to activate dangerous mystical energies that bind Mungiki members to one another in relationships of secrecy and obligation. Here it is notable that the mention of oathing appears right after a description of the military-style equipment of the special police unit, which had invaded the compound. As the reporter explains:

From a distance the paramilitary police unit, specially trained for insurgency, presents a setting of an action-packed Hollywood thriller. Each officer is armed with an automatic gun, with a pistol and a knife strapped on either side of the waist. Rounds of ammunition are secured across the chest, which is encrusted in a heavy bulletproof vest. Under the scorching sun, the officers wear steel helmets and face masks that only leave the nose and mouth visible. A senior police officer said they needed to be well armed when dealing with a group like Mungiki.⁵

At work here, I argue, is an implicit comparison of differing technologies of lethal force. While it may be tempting to follow the author’s implication that the potential use of lethal/legal force by police is secular and rational and that of Mungiki is magicoreligious (Gluckman 1972), I argue that the proliferation under Moi of new, heavily armed police units on the one hand, and social movements like Mungiki armed with technologies of the numinous, on the other, are two sides of the same problem. That is, at a moment when the state’s imprimatur was rendered fugitive (the Anglo-Leasing scandal), supplementary violence appeared to be required to enforce the truth of words, whether that entailed the speech act of swearing oaths in a nominally traditional ritual context, or in acts of modern law enforcement.

When Mungiki emerged in the late 1990s, their activities both fascinated and terrified the Kenyan public. On the one hand, it was a neotraditional Kikuyu religious organization, and in that guise it advocated a return to what it imagined as Kikuyu custom. But Mungiki was also a counter-state (Smith 1998) of sorts, at times controlling the circulation of a large share of the money and people in the informal economy of transportation, especially in Nairobi. As a self-consciously conceived youth movement, its members were initially quite critical of the types of spectacles of largesse that characterized state bureaucratic behavior, which was almost always understood as gerontocratic—power and privilege which, generally speaking, Kenyans understand to accrue to certain members of society due to their old age. Mungiki’s lower echelons were composed of a class having the most peripheral status in terms of access to state patrimonial distribution, education, and mechanisms of upward mobility more generally. As these material and symbolic resources have historically been the very ground through which Kenyans have acted upon the world, their increasing instability—and, in some cases, their absence—led urban Kikuyu youth to question from where the power to stabilize the forms and flows of such resources should emanate. Moreover, the exact nature of that power—the power to back everything from the stability of monetary value to political promises of development—was also fundamentally up for grabs. By the end of the Moi era in 2002, the regime had resorted to counterfeiting everything from currency to title deeds.⁶

Mungiki thus appeared in one sense to partake of the kind of maximizing instrumentality characteristic of the corporation: they quite literally seized the key symbol of the state—money—through unofficial taxation of taxis and protection racketeering in slums (Kagwanja 2005). At the same time, Mungiki’s corporate unity, such as it was, was ultimately backed by ritual. The group self-consciously attempted to emulate Mau Mau guerillas of the 1950s by swearing loyalty and secrecy oaths allegedly backed by a lethal, mystical force. Given the complex role that oathing has played in the Kenyan historical and political imagination, it is hardly surprising that the aggressively youth-oriented Mungiki looked to a seemingly traditional ritual form to bind themselves to one another and, initially, quarantine themselves from the corrupting power of the wazee. But for the wider Kikuyu and Kenyan public, as well as the state, Mungiki’s use of oaths was a profound source of public anxiety.

In the precolonial and early colonial period, Kikuyu oaths were associated with a mysterious force called thahu, which constantly emanated from the natural world and stood as an ever-present source of disintegration for the social world. Oaths invoked the power of thahu, and with it the condition of bodily wasting (also called thahu) that ensued if one broke the statutes of the oath or its bonds of secrecy. Today, however, most Kenyans associate oaths with the Mau Mau rebellion, Kenya’s anticolonial insurgency and Kikuyu civil war of the 1950s. The oathing rituals that Mau Mau used in their attempts to produce solidarity inside the movement came to be seen by many Kenyans of all ethnic backgrounds (but especially white settlers) as a reckless Kikuyu involvement with forces they did not really control: These oaths were understood not only to be backed by mystical violence, but to also be generative of physical violence.

For most, the oath lay somewhere between the obscenity of sheer violence and the promise of the rule of law, and it often vacillated between these two poles in the arena of public opinion. While those still sympathetic to the Mau Mau war to win back land from white settlers may have recognized the legitimacy of oathing during the 1950s, by the early 2000s, most were apprehensive about Mungiki’s oathing practices. For contemporary Kikuyus especially, the oath was a form of power little understood in terms of its mechanics and efficacy beyond it being a traditional practice. For many, the oath really just gestured to violent excess, a violence that produced as much social division as Kikuyu unity in the 1950s. It is no wonder, then, that Mungiki’s public reception as a self-proclaimed moral reform movement, rooted in the conservatizing ethos of tradition, involved both celebration and censure. Slum residents in Nairobi, particularly before the 2002 elections, at times attributed a bureaucratic efficiency to Mungiki that they no longer found in the state (if they ever had in the first place). Mungiki organized garbage clean-ups in the slums, provided security, and even performed customary legal proceedings to settle conflicts between patrilineages over bridewealth debts. Mungiki’s psychosocial texture was thus fundamentally uncanny. They felt like a threatening echo of Mau Mau and providers of modern services.

However, after a period of their relative acceptance in the Kenyan public sphere, Mungiki’s standing changed drastically on March 2, 2002. That evening, some 300 alleged Mungiki members rampaged through Nairobi’s Kariobangi slum, where they killed over twenty non-Kikuyu residents, many of whom were members of a rival Luo vigilante group known as Kamjesh. The eruptive nature of the attack and the likelihood that Mungiki were now working for slumlords against their competition suggests that some elements of Mungiki had strayed from their moral reform program and had become implicated in the messy game of privatized violence, a concomitant element of Kenya’s more official politics (cf. Anderson 2002). Nevertheless, Kenyans continued to feel more ambivalent about Mungiki than they did about other majeshi (armies). These ethnically based militias were by no means foreign to Kenyan politics; they resembled ruling-party youth wings from earlier moments in Kenyan political history and were often called "majeshi ya wazee, or armies of the old men."⁷ Mungiki, in contrast, was a similar youth army, but committed to backing youth candidates. Indeed, in a sudden change of political direction (one of many), Mungiki—who had been ardently anti-Moi—ended up supporting President Moi’s candidate of choice to succeed him in the 2002 elections. This youth candidate was the current president of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta. Just after Kibaki was voted into power in December 2002, Mungiki engaged in deadly battles with the police over the control of taxi routes in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru. Here, the movement’s much commented-upon fearlessness transgressed the limits of acceptability in the eyes of much of the public.

When talking to current and former Mungiki members in 2005, I found they often defended the oath as being beyond talk. As a euphemism for Mungiki’s alleged immunity to bribes, they argued that their oath distinguished them from simply being a private army, like other majeshi ya wazee. These other armies of the old men, youth gangs sponsored and paid for by different ethnic big men, Mungiki viewed as lacking their own moral and religious seriousness, which they believed made them more than mercenaries. By being beyond talk, the oath represented an ultimate sovereign authority, backing the sincerity of Mungiki’s utterances and actions as well as their joint secrecy. Until 2001, neither police nor politicians could infiltrate the movement.⁸ However, Mungiki purportedly infiltrated the police, feeding their own intelligence apparatus using police informants, whose loyalty, in contrast to their own, was negotiable. Kenyan police carry machine guns and expect money from ordinary Kenyans at traffic stops, yet they were never the object of public anxiety that Mungiki was. Kenyans generally have assumed that the police always have their price. There was a measure of security in the bribe market. The police, hardly an unknown, came to be viewed more as obstacles in the way of getting daily business done. They were not the embodiments of the force of law per se. This negotiability of police-citizen relations gave the latter a chance to domesticate the state through the former.⁹

The Mungiki oath was an implicit critique of this state of affairs. But it also stood as a critique of the way Kenyans had long been in bed with the state, in what Achille Mbembe has aptly described as relations of illicit conviviality (Mbembe 2001, 128), which are neither reducible to social control by force nor a dynamic of domination and resistance. In the patrimonial system of big men (big and old are often interchangeable qualities for Kenyans), people voted for politicians because of their access to resources of the state, which they were in turn morally obligated to distribute to their constituencies (de Sardan 1999). Yet, as Cold War levels of donor aid increasingly dried up, and a regime du simulacre emerged under Moi to replace the patrimonial state, the oath stood as something of a symbolic lament: let there be truth, Mungiki seemed to be saying, even if that truth required a supplementary violence to enforce it. In sharp contrast to this imaginary of sovereign force outside of Kenya’s ubiquitous transactional chains, a former Mungiki commander once told me that he had joined Mungiki because elders, especially elders of the state—an almost exclusively male category—had become like money: they were occasionally dependable, but ultimately, in the transactional dynamics that permeate all aspects of Kenyan life, they were an unstable basis for social life, much like the Kenyan shilling under President Moi.

Kibaki’s Little Coin

In 2005, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty was the ubiquitous price for many urban routes vocally broadcast by touts across matatu stages in Nairobi’s city center. One day in 2005, it was also exactly half of the value of the 40-shilling coin in my pocket that allowed me to avoid breaking a 500-shilling note to pay for the fare. At the time, paying taxi fares with large notes was considered bad manners in Kenya: it violated the frenetic loose change spirit of the matatu world. Big notes are cumbersome to make change for, requiring matatu drivers to actually come to a complete stop while the conductor or tout counts out change. Big bills also inhibit the conductor from making change for other passengers crammed into the matatu.

This particular 40-shilling coin, new in 2003, was minted to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Kenyan independence. The coin’s obverse was emblazoned with the image of President Mwai Kibaki, who, besides celebrating the nation’s birthday, was also clearly following in the footsteps of his presidential predecessors, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi (and for that matter Queen Elizabeth). While still living, both presidents had placed their own images on the nation’s legal tender, not just on coins and small value notes but on much higher denominations like 500- and 1,000-shilling notes. In other words, having just achieved an election victory in the December general elections of 2002, Kibaki’s commemorative 40-shilling coin appeared quite modest in juxtaposition to those of his predecessors. In attempting to usher in a new dispensation in governance, the new coin’s exchange value and circulation were kept relatively low, suggesting a proposed new ethos of restrained state largesse.

This minted modesty seemed partially to be a response to an informal pre-election public debate about whether it was appropriate to have a living president on the nation’s currency at all (and indeed the new constitution bars the use of images of living presidents on the currency, but new currency has yet to be printed). The iconic signifier of gerontocratic authority, Moi, had been placed on every denomination of coin