I had dinner with my parents, my sister and her wife Friday night. The topic of conversation, as I suspect it was around many family dinner tables, was the Iowa caucuses, the first step in the almost interminable process of selecting US presidential candidates.

I was thrilled that Obama was able to beat out presumtive front-runner Hillary Clinton and wondered aloud whether the victory of an African-American candidate in lily-white Iowa meant that the US had made major progress against pervasive racism. (I’m far from the only one to ask this question.)

My sister-in-law wasn’t buying it. An African-American woman in a same-sex marriage, she encounters lots more prejudice and racism in daily life than I do. (Yes, even in liberal, gay-friendly Massachusetts, where we all live.) As she talked about her sense that Obama can’t win primaries in the South, I found myself thinking of a blogpost I’d read earlier that day.

Lower Manhattanite, writing on the Group News Blog, offered his visceral reaction to Obama’s victory in Iowa - the profound fear that the Senator would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

Mom was all of 21 when Malcolm was killed uptown. She and my dad knew him well. This was resonating deeply in her, and I could hear the upset in her voice. We lived around the corner on 115th Street from the Mosque they fire-bombed in “retaliation” the next day. Ascendant Black men at rostrums was going to hit my mom funny no matter what. And she was not wrong for the trepidation she felt.

“Are any Black people watching this tonight just enjoying the history of all this? Or are they all as nervous as we are?”, I asked her.

…

I don’t know if you’ll ever really understand it and why it comes so quickly to the fore for Black folks. I guess, you need only to look at not distant, but recent American history and how deadly cruel it has been to Black people on the cusp of busting a door wide open. In my lifetime, Malcolm X was cut down. Medgar Evers was blown away. Martin Luther King’s flame was sniper’s bullet snuffed. Never mind all the back-room, black-bag shit the U.S. government ran on folks who stood tough locally like Chicago’s Fred Hampton and others.

We have developed an unfortunate Pavlovian response to the repeated sight of our best and brightest being blown away like so many dandelion bits in the wind.

And so we talked for a while about how much harder it is to be hopeful about racism in America when you’re not white. And my sister talked about the strength of Huckabee as a candidate and her fear that an evangelical candidate might be unstoppable in a national election.

And I realized that we were talking about tribalism.

My Kenyan friends, both home and abroad, have been highly critical of Northern media’s coverage of the political violence in Kenya. Friends are upset that the situation is immediately compared to the genocide in Rwanda. And they’re frustrated that coverage often falls into an African news trap - “Oh well, it’s all about ancient tribal hatred - nothing we can do about it.”

My friend Binyavanga Wainaina has an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, titled “No Country for Old Hatreds“, which does an excellent job of combatting that narrative. He points out that Kenya has a much more coherent national identity than many African nations, and that ethnic politics have lost out to pan-ethnic movements in the past. He notes, “Mr. Odinga and President Kibaki are not really ethnic leaders, but in the days since the disputed election they have stoked tribal paranoia and used it to cement electoral loyalty.”

In other words, the crisis in Kenya is not about Kikuyu versus Luo - thought some of the resulting violence may be. It’s about a leader who’s failed to implement the changes he’s promised and his desire to keep power, and the attempts of an opposition leader to build the narrative of a people’s revolution and gain international support. And both sides are taking advantage of one of the oldest possible narratives: tribe.

Tribe is a narrative that makes intuitive sense to people. Birds of a feather do flock together, in a phenomenon that social scientists call “homophily“. It makes sense that tribes tend to vote together as well. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Kenya is likely to survive this crisis, and it will survive for reasons that Bankelele suggested in a post a few days ago:

- Neighbors talking to one another about maintaining their many years of peace
- Neighbors setting up watch out groups and liaising with the local police
- Neighbors taking in and sheltering friends, relative and strangers
- Police officers talking down residents this morning who had hoped to march to Uhuru Park.
- Local leaders and MP’s talking to their constituents – preaching non violence.
- Neighbors standing together and ignoring the sparks from outsiders

It’s too easy to dismiss African political stories as the legacy of tribalism. Assuming that people will behave a certain way because of ancient hatreds, of in- and out-groups denies people political agency.

Kinda like my family and I were doing the other night as we talked about the Iowa caucuses.

Kenya can survive what it’s facing now by rejecting the simple narrative of tribe amd seizing the moment. Binyavanga argues, “The moment is now to make a solid thing called Kenya.” Maybe, just maybe, it’s possible for America to seize that moment, too.

I had a post queued up forthe start of 2008. I’d planned to begin the year on an enthusiastic, positive note, suggesting that this might be the year where Africa began to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of telecommunications and where African creativity and entrepreneurialism began to be noticed on a global stage. Central to my argument was the rise of the Kenyan stock exchange, the emergence of international calibre business process outsourcing centers in Kenya, and the completion of deals to create two or three high-speed internet cables that connect Kenya to the global internet.

That post will be on hold for a little while. Or as my friend at Bankelele puts it, “Up till December 2007, the focus of Kenya was investing towards Vision 2030 - now we may have to find a new target to aim for – a Vision 2009, which is to perhaps to get the economy back to where it was in 2007.” Right now, it’s unclear who will be running Kenya in 2008, whether he will have the possibility of passing a budget, and how many people will be killed before the faceoff between Odinga and Kibaki is resolved.

I wasn’t watching the Kenyan elections closely. I took off the end of the year, as I do every year, and was spending time at my house with friends, when my mobile started going off. I got a small flood of text messages from Afrophiles around the world, most of which included the phrase, “This is heartbreaking.”

That’s the right word. Kenya’s a country so stable that the EU had considered not sending observers to monitor these elections, arguing that the chances of irregularities were low and that resources for African election monitoring were scarce. Yes, we’re all used to irregularities in Kenyan politics… but there are creative government-monitoring efforts, a vibrant blogosphere, and an occasionally excellent (and occasionally very disappointing) free press, which all make outright theft of an election less likely than in most African states.

Yet that’s what appears to have happened. The Economist pulls no punches:

The decision to return Kenya’s 76-year-old incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, to office was not made by the Kenyan people but by a small group of hardline leaders from Mr Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe. They made up their minds before the result was announced, perhaps even before the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, had opened up a lead in early returns from the December 27th election. It was a civil coup.

Despite that mention of tribal affiliation in the opening graph, the Economist avoids the “reminiscent of the Rwandan genocide” theme that’s rearing its head in CNN, the Guardian and other northern media outlets. Christian Science Monitor, to their credit, is already debunking that storyline, offering a piece by Scott Baidauff titled “Ethnic Violence: Why Kenya is Not Another Rwanda“.

It may be a cause for optimism that the northern media is worried about missing another case of ethnic cleansing - as it did for the whole Rwandan genocide, the first years of the Darfur genocide, and continues to do with ethnic violence in the DRC - but it’s also deeply frustrating to Kenyans who want a more complicated story told to the world about these elections and the tensions it has exposed. Bankelele has an inspiring post about people who are maintaining the peace, which reads in part:

The answer is citizens themselves.
Every day this week, I have heard & seen touching stories like these;
- Neighbors talking to one another about maintaining their many years of peace
- Neighbors setting up watch out groups and liaising with the local police
- Neighbors taking in and sheltering friends, relative and strangers
- Police officers talking down residents this morning who had hoped to march to Uhuru Park.
- Local leaders and MP’s talking to their constituents – preaching non violence.
- Neighbors standing together and ignoring the sparks from outsiders

Al Jazeera’s coverage has been excellent, focusing on the government crackdown on peaceful protest, as well as on violence between civilians. Their excellent correspondent Mohammed Adow has been on the ground, shooting footage of Uhuru Park and the clashes between protesters and riot police:

But the best source for news, moment to moment, has been from bloggers, who continued to report on the elections and their aftermath during a media blackout. My friend Juliana Rotich - Global Voices’s environment editor - is in Eldoret, where rioters burned a church sheltering people who’d sought sanctuary from violence, killing dozens of them. She’s providing terse dispatches from the town, reporting on traffic at the airport, the closure of local businesses, the death of a local hero, an Olympic athlete, in political violence.

Juliana, like my other friends in Kenya, are reporting using GPRS service from Safaricom and other mobile operators as connectivity has been sporadic. With that in mind, it’s pretty amazing the sort of work Daudi Were is doing on Mental Acrobatics. Daudi followed supporters of the Orange Democratic Movement to Uhuru Park in Nairobi to a planned protest, and documented the confrontation between the General Service Unit (an elite group of paramilitary police) and political demonstrators. He’s got photos journalists would kill for, including shots that are disturbing to anyone who knows Nairobi well - streets that should be packed with the daily streetlife of the capital which are silent and shuttered today.

Downtown Nairobi, January 3rd, 2008. Photo by Daudi Were.

It takes guts to go out into the streets and get into the face of paramilitary police. It also takes guts to take care of your family and walk away from a situation. Ory Okolloh has been providing moment to moment dispatches on her blog, Kenyan Pundit. Yesterday, she decided to leave Nairobi for Johannesburg, where she currently lives, a decision that clearly was extremely difficult for her to make. She’s got a very young daughter, and as much as her passion for Kenya was keeping her in Nairobi, she made the right call to go back to South Africa.

It’s people like Ory, Daudi and Juliana - and the hundreds of other bloggers out there covering the situation - who give me every confidence that Kenya will continue to rise, and that the future of this beautiful nation is a bright one. But this is a dark moment, and my heart goes out to everyone who loves Kenya and wants to see it peaceful, prosperous, democratic and free.

Global Voices is rounding up blogs from the Kenyan blogosphere. Ndesanjo Macha has already posted two comprehensive roundups, and we’ll likely have a special coverage page up in the next day or so, focused on blogs covering the events in Kenya.

The situation in Somalia is spiraling out of control, and, as always, it requires some serious digging to understand what’s actually going on. Sheikh Qasim Ibrahim Nur, the national security director of the Ethiopian- and US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) noted that “About 80 per cent of Somalia is not safe and is not under control of the government.”

His statement was almost immediately undercut by the Ethiopian government, whose troops have made it possible for the TFG to have any presence in Mogadishu. Bereket Simon, an advisor to Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, dismissed talk of the resurgence of the Union of Islamic Courts, saying, “The facts on the ground tell you that [the UIC] are in bad shape and having serious difficulties.”

Maybe Simon and Sheik Nur should get together and coordinate their stories, as the Sheik told reporters, “Foreign Islamist elements from Afghanistan, Chechnya and some Arab nations have arrived (in October and November). There are around 4,500 foreign terrorists in the country.” One would assume those alleged terrorists are supporting the Union of Islamic Courts, which briefly managed to achieve some peace and calm in Mogadishu, before the Ethiopian army (with US support) chased them underground. But perhaps they’re just in town on holiday, since the UIC is “having serious difficulties.”

Nur’s statement fits with the narrative that Ethiopia and TFG have been feeding their supporters - Somalia is a hotbed for international terror, and international intervention is neccesary to stabilize the region. Other of his statements seem custom-designed for the Bush administration: “We have evidence that a large amount of weapons were shipped to Somalia from Iran… These sophisticated weapons were intended to annihilate the Somali people.” Reuters noted that this statement “could not immediately be independently verified.” It certainly would be fascinating if it were true - Shia Iran supporting Sunni insurgents (and, allegedly, Sunni al-Qaeda) in a Sunni nation against Christian troops?

The occasion for this linguistic battle between allies was a mortar strike on Bakara Market, a busy center in Mogadishu. Ethiopia denies shelling the market, with Simon arguing that Ethiopian forces have the UIC under control, and therefore have no need to shell civilians. Indeed, Ethiopian Information Minister Berhan Hailu (safely in Addis Ababa) told reporters, “As far as we know, Mogadishu remained peaceful during the week.” He might want to pass that on to the 19 dead and 40 injured in the blasts. Somali analysts say that Ethopian forces are the only ones in the region with the capability to fire the sorts of shells that caused the carnage in the market. (Wanna bet that someone blames Iranian weaponry for this attack in the next couple of days?)

It’s hard to follow this story for a lot of reasons, not just because virtually every source is unreliable. Increasingly, it’s difficult for any reporters to operate in Mogadishu, or Somalia as a whole. According to David Axe, who wrote an excellent series of posts from Mogadishu, “Pretty much every one of Mogadishu’s roughly 100 independent media workers has been arrested for reporting on the fighting – some for days, some for weeks.” In a longer piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, he reports that the TFG is systematically harrassing journalists, attempting to quash any reports of fighting in the city or refugees fleeing.

In the process, they’ve created a much more repressive media environment than existed under the UIC, and have cut off essential information services. Think of the importance of a morning traffic report in a city where gunfire and extortive roadblocks are routine. Shabelle Radio provided one, with a dozen journalists contributing stories from around the city on the “Today in Mogadishu” program. The show has been off the air since the TFG shot up Shabelle’s offices at the end of Ramadan.

Axe’s reporting is extremely helpful for people trying to follow the Somalia story closely. He offers a useful history of Bakara Market, including the rise of a private militia to protect businesses and shoppers. That militia was chased out by the TFG earlier this year, and they turned over 1700 weapons to the TFG. (When TFG soliders get sick of not getting paid by their dysfunctional government, they sell their AK47s to local toughs, who use them to man barricades and rob passers-by of their mobile phones.) I’m slightly put off by Axe’s narrative of self-sacrifice and machismo - his first few entries focus on the dire warnings he ignored in going to Somalia, and his decision to quit his employ with McGraw Hill to make the trip - but I can’t argue with his bravery or with his reporting on the ground. (After all, Yahoo’s resident war correspondent, Kevin Sites hasn’t been there since a five-day trip in 2005, before the Ethiopian invasion…)

And I appreciate his efforts to clarify US involvement in the situation. He argues, “The United States is playing both sides, supporting the army inciting much of the fighting AND the army with the best chance of bringing peace.” That latter army is the fledgling AU force, which currently includes 1,800 Ugandan troops. Uganda and Ethiopia have been competing to be the US’s best friend in the Horn, and Axe notes that the Ugandan troops and trained and supported with US money and US-backed mercenaries, including DynCorp.

Axe only got a partial picture in his two weeks in Somalia, but it’s a vital and important one. Only a few media sources are shining a light on the situation in Somalia. The LA Times has an excellent article today about aid convoys shipping grain to the country with an escort from the French navy to protect ships from piracy - I would love to have the backstory on how Edmund Sanders got this story from Marka, 45 miles south of Somalia. Most media sources are relying just on wire stories… and those wire stories are getting harder to get as the TFG cracks down on all independent journalists, not just those reporting locally.

Closing his Somalia series, Axe notes, “…it’s about how the U.S. aims to fight wars in Africa — by proxy — and how these proxy wars might have the same result as our misguided invasion of Iraq. Instead of destroying Islamic extremists, pre-emptive wars often breed them.” He’s absolutely right. That’s the insanity of US and Ethiopian involvement in Somalia: we took a stabilizing security situation in Somalia and turned it into a humanitarian disaster. And we did it with almost no one in the US noticing.

Don’t say the Bush administration doesn’t learn from its mistakes - the government reaction to the quagmire in Iraq was to keep our next foray in the “war on terror” as quiet as possible, hoping no one would notice. For the most part, no one has.