In mid October 2001 I almost quit being a TV producer intern
after only 4 days on the job. I was in
tears, it was lunchtime and I was rapidly swallowing cold beer after cold beer
in the heat of Mombasa. I wanted to quit, right after I slapped the living
excrement out of my camera man.
I was only 23 years old, a mom to a three year old boy, my
own mother thought I was going to be Christian Amanpour and I was an intern for
Reuters News service. Let’s just say I had just had the mother of all mornings.
I was inhaling my beer that way because I had just escaped a lynching. Jesus
wept.
2 days earlier, my senior news producer had told me in a
cold, disdainful voice to “*expletive* go and find supporters of Osama Bin
Laden among members of Islamic Party of Kenya, *expletive*”. 2 weeks prior to
this, the US had begun bombing Afghanistan.
So off we went to Mombasa; I and two experienced journalists to pick up
a feature story for the news service. We spent the Friday morning talking to
Sheikhs and Imams at Sakina Mosque. I will never forget one of the Sheikhs, a
cross-eyed fellow who sincerely just gave me funny looks. I am guessing it’s
because we were with a white text journalist. Something about her just made him
cross.
We waited outside while the cameraman took images of Muslims
in prayer inside the mosque and snippets of cross-eyed yelling to high heaven
about the demonic terror of the FBI. Now here is where really I should have
been paying attention, but it was in Swahili and the guy was cross-eyed so you
know, I just fiddled with my microphones and the nifty Nokia my camera man
owned. As soon as the service ended, a flood of Muslim men came outside and one
guy, out of the blue just approached us.
“You are FBI!” he screamed at my white colleague. Before I
could even react, she laughed, thinking he was joking. He slapped her right
across her face, HARD. I was so shocked and dropped the microphone and by the
time I picked it up, a group of young men were pushing and slapping us. The
text journalist managed to hand her business card to the accuser, and he saw
that we were journalists with Reuters.
So he nods his head and says, “Hey! It’s ok! They are journalists!” but
it was too late. The crowd had already been riled up by cross-eyed and now Mr.
Slapper had set off a chain of events. During this whole melee, I accidentally
speed dialed our Nairobi office and the Senior Producer heard us screaming. So
he frantically calls the Nation offices in Mombasa and his contacts in the
police force. Meanwhile the cameraman has rushed out and got us into a vehicle
and somehow, somehow the main Imam got the crowds to let us leave.
So here I was, swallowing way too much liquor for lunch,
angry as hell at the cameraman for being inside the Mosque instead of outside
so we could have left sooner, and quitting. In all of that horrible excitement,
I only had one question in my head: WHY?
Why did they do that to us? Why were Muslim men attacking
women journalists, on a Friday, outside their own mosque?
This conversation is the beginning of the explanation behind
what happened to me, and what has happened to our Muslim brothers and sisters
in Kenya, in the name of counter- terrorism.
To understand Islam in Kenya is to go back in time to the
very history of this former colony; to a time when the only literate people in
East Africa were Muslims. Long before the colonial government even began
forming, the Muslim community at the coastal region already had a fully
integrated Islamic based system and civilization; education, economic and
social matters all united in one faith.
When the missionaries arrived they discovered that the only
literate people they could rely on were the Swahili people who served them as
clerks. As the missionaries moved deeper inland, they inadvertently also
facilitated the spread of Islam inwards, as their own clerks would share their
beliefs with the people they met even as the missionaries shared theirs.
As a counter active measure designed to begin the process of
dehumanizing and alienating Muslims, it became decree that anyone who was
Islamic was illiterate, despite the exact opposite being true, and that anyone
who did not speak English was uneducated. The idea was to supplant the
knowledge already being passed on to the different ethnic communities and force
them into western and Christian education that was inherently designed to
enslave and misinform the people such that they can only become workers.
This measure is typical of the war on Islam; a measure that
rides on ignorance, and the spread of fear and mistrust of anything Islamic.
Since that time and even with the development of the colonial and later
“independent” Kenyan government, the systematic tactic is to alienate and
dismantle the Islamic systems and way of life among the people. The result of
this systematized dismantling of a culture, faith and way of life is that
Muslims were utterly separated from their own ethnic communities upon saying
the Shahada; this separation ensured that Muslims live completely ostracized
from society by design. They become disinherited and loose connection with
their people.
During the Bomas draft of the new Kenya constitution
Professor Wangari Maathai proposed and pushed for a total 120 ethnic communities
living within our borders to be protected in the tenets of the constitution.
The fact of the matter is, regardless of what ethnicity you were born with,
once you are a Muslim in Kenya, you are an entirely difference set of human
species and are treated as such.
There has been a systematic build up of oppression on Muslim
communities but two very significant world events set into motion the present
circumstances that that Muslims around the world face, a dark and inhuman age
all in the name of counter-terrorism. Those events are the US Embassy bombings
in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the Twin Towers bombing in the US in
2001. In the coming weeks, I will
explore the sequence of events and actions taken by the Kenyan government in
the name of counter-terrorism that in fact oppress Muslim communities and have
led to the radicalization of some by reason of reacting to being terrorized
themselves.
*************************************************
The Kenyan War on Islam: A ramadhan conversation part 2
http://storymojahayfestival.com/the-kenyan-war-on-islam-a-ramadhan-conversation-part-ii/
The first friend I ever made in Mombasa Primary school was
this tiny girl called Salwa. Salwa was a Kenyan of Yemeni Arab descent; small,
even smaller than me, and I am only a few inches taller than a midget. We were
quite the pair, always together, always getting into trouble. She was a little
lady, I was an unabashed tomboy, try as she might, she couldn’t get me to stop
climbing everything and picking up everything. “Yuck! Betty!” was her constant
scream at break-time. I loved the look on her face when I picked up millipedes,
and also how she ran away laughing.
My first memory of Ramadan was when Salwa refused to eat my
break with me. “I am on Saum.” My first lessons on Islam were taught to me by a
very solemn Salwa. “Never ever put the Quran on the bottom, Betty, put it on
top of your other books.” Up until that point, I did not realize that her hijab
was part of her Islamic identity; I always thought that it was because her hair
was so long so she had to cover it to protect it from getting dirty.
I grew up in Mombasa with Muslim friends, of all ethnicities
and it never ever occurred to me that I was a “foreigner”. But I am Kikuyu, and
my family had moved to Mombasa just before I was born, so we were indeed alien
to the coast.
The issues of non-coastal people inhabiting the coastal
region has progressively become a highly contentious matter; a situation so
volatile that in 1992 there were the first attacks on “watu wa bara” by militants
who wanted them to return up country.
This attitude is entirely contrary to the culture of the
coastal people and Muslim communities; theirs is a non-resistant and welcoming
approach to strangers and foreigners. For this turn of civility to occur, there
were indeed historical injustices inflicted on the people of the coast.
When the missionaries first arrived at the port of Mombasa,
they were met with non-resistance; it was the nature of the Africans and
Muslims to be welcoming, to share what they had, and to ensure that the
visitors were comfortable. The missionaries found that the most advanced
settlements were among the Muslim communities; towns complete with sewerage,
sanitation and water delivery systems and building made of stones with beautifully
crafted wooden doors. Naturally, the missionaries would turn to the Waswahili
people to serve them as clerks, because they were the ones who were literate.
Indeed, the entire region of Mombasa and greater parts of the Coast were under
the rule of the Sultan of Zanzibar - a government that based its rule on
Islamic principles fully entrenched with education, financial systems and
judiciary. The Wali were the administrators, and the Kadhi courts dispensed
justice. The con was to trick the coastal people that they would retain that
system.
This is indeed the story of Islam in all the colonies in
Africa – that the Islamic systems were dismantled through cruel trickery and
sometimes even violence from the colonialists.
As the missionaries advanced inwards, the Waswahili would
establish “Majengo” settlements; miniature administrative towns that were
complete with sanitation and ablution facilities. The Majengo settlements were
found wherever the missionaries and later colonial administrators needed to set
up office. The name “Wastaarabuni” came to imply a civilized people, as the
Majengo were indeed the most civilized settlements to be found, complete with
Wali and Kadhi court systems as was the norm with Islamic communities. With the
proliferation of the Majengo settlements came the advancement of the Islamic
faith among the ethnic communities living near those settlements. Islam spread
as far north as Mandera and Wajir, and as far west as Mumias.
It became clear to the missionaries and early colonialists
that the spread of Islam was entirely contrary to their own objectives and so
certain decrees became part of their design to curb and control the Muslims.
Because Islam was gaining dominance, the claim that Islamic education is
illiteracy was a tactical development in an effort to formalize the colonial
administration. Since that time, the absolute absence of Islamic education in
Kenya’s educational system has been enforced. With the exception of Islamic
Religious Education as a sole subject in classrooms, there is an absolute
dearth of any sort of Islamic knowledge being passed on as far as government,
jurisprudence, culture or economic systems are concerned.
On the whole,
everything Islamic was dismantled even at the coast and especially in the
constitution – there was an absolute disappearance of the Wali and the Kadhi
courts were restricted to dealing with the Muslim communities’ family laws. In
all this, the Christian Church was actively pushing for the exclusion of
anything Islamic in nature including the Kadhi system, education, wali system
of administration and economics. Indeed the church till today is influential in
blocking Sharia system of banking, rendering a lot of people incapable of
accessing credit.
A significant factor to disenfranchising Muslims in Kenya and
especially at the coast was the fact that even in the Majengo settlements the
colonial administration would refuse to give title to the Muslims. The same
goes for the coastal people; they to this day hold no title to land that they
have inhabited for centuries. This is a deliberate design to deny economic
power or development and to keep the Muslim community totally marginalized.
Without title, one certainly could not lay claim to the very
land their houses stood upon. Even after independence, as President Jomo
Kenyatta redistributed titles to the indigenous people, the coastal people were
not accorded titles. Instead, people from up country, “Watu wa Bara” were
allowed to settle at the coast and later acquire title deeds even though they
were not the original inhabitants. This is the grave crime that especially the
Gikuyu people at the coast are guilty of.
This sort of economic injustice and unfair acquisition of
land was epitomized by Coast Provincial commissioner, Eluid Mahihu, the very
representation of the “Gikuyu” grabbing mentality; a man who was the living
definition of a “foreigner” and who was both a corrupt person and also the face
of the church. His was a double injustice – as he acquired property through
grabbing of land, he hid himself as a “pious” elder of the Presbyterian Church
of East Africa. Indeed, over time, the P.C.E.A church has become predominantly
Kikuyu and the activities of criminals among the congregation silently ignored.
The hypocritical actions of church leaders have directly
contributed to over all tensions and mistrust between the coastal people and
“Christians” from other parts of the country. Indeed, where as once, the
coastal people could identify themselves separately as Muslim and non-Muslim,
today they identify themselves as one community regardless of their faith
because to date they remain squatters on their own land, impoverished and
marginalized.
Without title one cannot borrow money, and certainly cannot
develop anything on land that they do not “possess”. This is the essence of the
poverty at the coast, the source of animosity among the coastals towards
“foreigners”, whether white or African. From Vanga, near the border of Kenya
and Tanzania to Kiunga at the border of Kenya and Somalia, the title deeds are
owned by “foreigners”. Well. Not ALL titles. Just as in any civilization, among
the people of the coast of Kenya, you will find the Collaborators, the Puppets,
and of course, those closest to the centre of power. They too, acquired title.
The claim is that
these absentee landlords are people from Saudi Arabia and Yemen; the truth is
that these landlords comprise of Kenyan nationals who acquired title through
corrupt and unjust means. So called absentee landlords are just a camouflage
for a select few, foreigners from up-country and actual foreigners to acquire
property at the coast and turn the coastal people into squatters in their own
land.
To date, Muslims remain impoverished and excluded because of
their faith for two reasons – their faith does not allow usury or transactions
with interest and they do not own title to property.
It is within these circumstances that the Kenya government
thus seeks to enact a “War on Terrorism” that is targeted at the Muslim
community; where as a search for suspects of other crimes results in only those
suspects being arrested and detained, Kenya’s counter- terrorism tactics involve
raiding, arresting and detaining entire families, blatant criminal vandalism,
plunder, rape and extra-judicial killings. In Kenya, ALL Muslims are terrorism
suspects.
That this is going on within our borders, with the knowledge
of our spiritual and political leaders is a testament to how deeply ingrain our
collective hypocrisy and bigotry is a nation. WE are the terrorists!
bettywaitherero
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