Blogging anew, as I audition for a Poli Sci Ph.D.

Well, hello again! It's sure been a while. A lot has happened since last I wrote: I started school, Kenya fell into shambles and then resurrected itself with, somehow, a more ridiculous form of government, I graduated from school. Oh, and I got a job in Ghana, which is why this blog has returned at all.You'll note the slightly tweaked title here- this is to reflect the fact that we're moving beyond the cozy, machete-ish confines of Kenya.

Before I head off to Ghana, though, I want to say a few things about Kenya, since I was sorely tempted to do so in January but figured it wouldn't get read. And I warn you, this is entirely analytical; I wish I had stories about running roadblocks of burning tires or of rescuing (and subsequently hugging in a photogenic manner) African children to spice this up, but I followed the crisis in Kenya from a couch in Pennington and a futon in Montreal. You're warned, then, that this is dry, but I promise to make it up to you when I begin taking my anti-malarials next week and start to hallucinate.

Anyway, I will say that I was a bit surprised by the amount of media coverage devoted to Kenya last winter. So often, major events in Africa slip away relatively unnoticed. A few thousand people killed in eastern Congo, a TB epidemic in South Africa, famine in Niger- these stories pop up on the margins of the BBC website, but make little dent in our consciousness. Even avid newshounds can be unaware of longstanding conflicts- has the name Casamance been uttered once on CNN during the decades-long war there? So, in this context, I was surprised to see pretty widespread coverage of the violence in Kenya. I suppose Kenya is famous enough, with its Out of Africa romance and its tourist resort relevancy, that it merits news attention.

That said, the coverage was almost uniformly bad. The violence was portrayed as the product of a deeply-flawed, deeply-divided society, in which the members of the different tribes had just been biding their time before they could sink their machetes or arrows into the flesh of one another. Reporters seemed to follow a template left-over from Rwanda (never-mind that their coverage of Rwanda was wrong, too), and failed to see Kenyan society as it really is. Tribal violence is rare outside of election periods, and is largely confined to cattle raiding. On a day-to-day basis, tribe appears to actually be a much less important division in Kenya than race is in the United States. There's no legacy of legal segregation of tribes, nor is there as much self-segregation as there is in the United States. Neighborhoods, even families, are rather mixed. A lot of people hold allegiances, through blood or marriage, to multiple ethnic groups. And if the Democratic campaign this spring has taught us nothing else, it's that voting along racial lines is not the sole province of dysfunctional African democracies.

The dysfunction in Kenyan democracy is the real story, however. The violence stems not from flaws in the social structure, but from flaws in the political structures. The political parties were bankrupt in their ideology and in their policies- the consequence, perhaps, of the international demand for balanced budgets and the cuts to discretionary spending as a result. The police are incapable of stopping violence even at the best of times, and the courts cannot effectively adjudicate disputes or administer justice. The Electoral Commission is not autonomous enough or strong enough to oversee a real campaign (though, I suppose, it's no more messed up than the FEC is). In short, many of the important institutions necessary for a democracy are missing in Kenya. The violence in Kenya was not the product of some ancient, tribal hatreds, it was the product of decades of failed policy and institution-building.

Alas, soon I'm off to Ghana. Apparently that country "works", with fair and safe elections and a government that occasionally improves the lives of its citizens. I'll run some roadblocks, hug some children and tell you how it goes.