Unedited Thoughts: Criminalising the Political Subaltern in Kenya
Development Economics, Community Development and related fields, in theory and practice, are nowhere near my current full time engagements. That is to say I have been doing this site, merely, as a pleasant distraction. And when the demands of my real life, as an M.A in Sociology student and upstart writer, call, and they have, lately, I am bound to respond. At the expense of keeping this site updated.
My particular specialisation is in Criminology and I am interested in what I imagine to be a history of criminalising the political subaltern in Kenya. The interest here is in how successive Kenyan governments, colonial and post-colonial, have managed to brutally repress political players by not only branding them criminals but also throwing the entire weight of a bastardised criminal justice system at them.
In all instances, these governments have successfully maintained the status quo (or a variant of it amenable to them) at the expense of the right of any citizen to have dissenting political views. This, it has to be made clear, has nothing to do with my own political ideas but just what is, objectively, observable.
In this regard, and the fact that my reading skills are poor not withstanding, I have been thinking about state power, how it is transacted & co. Foucault, I agree, is the go to guy on this but I believe in casting my net as wide as I can.
Earlier this year, while fleshing out my thoughts, reading Fredy Perlman’s The Reproduction of Everday Life and trying to imagine Kenya as a slave/master society, I shared a quote with a Kenyan scholar I greatly respect:
“The daily life enacted and perpetuated by the tribesman is a specific social response to particular material and historical conditions.
The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master’s authority. To men who live in a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific social form, and men submit to it only in very particular material and historical conditions.”
My scholar friend, while noting that Perlman was using a standard Hegelian argument that is actually abstracted from Hegel’s own world and circumstances, argued that that statement was either fallacious or at least not universally true. According to this scholar, lots of studies have examined the quotidian actions of slavery in terms of ongoing resistance. That with slavery comes a Foucauldian problematic, which is that where there is power there is resistance. Thus we can argue that resistance is part of the structure of slavery.
I totally agree, but my question is, is resistance always effective? At least, in Kenya, has it been? It is here that my idea that by criminalising the resistance early, the government is able to win the hearts and minds war, will dwell around for a few days. That with the argument that even though the government might embarrass itself, as it cracks down heavily on dissidents, and loose the goodwill of the citizenry, it is always able to stop alternative political thoughts from sipping down to the people. As concrete, actionable and transformative ideas.
Though a new political dispensation often emerges after periods of political dissent in Kenya, it is always stage-managed by the forces that be. So Kenyans buy into slogans, Uhuru; Katiba; multi party democracy, and never into ideas. The dominant political ideology in Kenya has never changed. Regimes eventually change, here, but the particular historical and material conditions that keep this a slave/master society never do.
Whether they need to is a different story all together.
N.M
One Response to “Unedited Thoughts: Criminalising the Political Subaltern in Kenya”
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Very interesting this. Nice conversation. Was wondering though on the fluidity of power- whether it remains constant in one hand or it diffuses to others. Whether at some point parts of the slave become masters and how they turn out to be, or whether some masters turn into slaves etc And the place of changing masters and slave faces in systems- do these systems of power shift in terms of how they look, or in their modus operandi because of some new entrants? Or do these new masters or slaves change face because of their positions? Maybe these changes don’t occur totally- parts of bodies become enslaved while others enslave at the same time. So that masters are victims some times and oppressors at others…and slaves too…It’s a shame that I don’t have examples!