I Say to You

I Say to You is a timely book, a must-read as Kenya heads into a critical 2013 election. A rich, historically rooted account of the politics and politicking of Kenya's ‘big men’ from Kalenjin-speaking communities, it offers a strong analytical narrative that helps explain the roots and contemporary manifestations of ethno-nationalist sentiments in the region. It also explores how the Kalenjin political class has experienced, harnessed, and debated these ethno-nationalist and related territorial agendas over time. This illiberal politics in Kenya's breadbasket, along with other factors, could still push the country into civil war – as it nearly did in 2007–8 when Kenya experienced murder, rape, massacre, and mass displacement. Drawing on fieldwork, historical analysis, and a fairly extensive review of past scholarship, Lynch sets out to get to the roots of Rift Valley politics. She persuasively applies a widely accepted view about the complex and contingent nature of identity and the way politicians feel pressure from and draw on genuine sentiments of loss, exclusion, and fear in their mobilization strategies. Some of these strategies cultivate fear and hatred of the constructed ‘other’, usually those who cannot be trusted to vote for dominant politicians. She also argues, correctly in my view, that the space to devise and implement such illiberal strategies is linked to the institutional context, noting ‘the tragedy of the Rift Valley is the way in which ethnic narratives of difference have been used by political elites in electoral contests, and the way democratic institutions have been purposefully run down and the violence used to protect vested interests’ (p. 11). An entrenched democratic constitutional order would alter the calculations and machinations of politicians and land many current politicians in jail rather than in office.

Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Ethnic group · Hatred · Identity politics · Narrative · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · African history and culture analysis · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

• We Are All Hypocrites Here

  P Lockwood•Current Anthropology•2024

  Add to list