Killing the Sheik

This chapter draws on the interlocking stories of the surviving relatives of a Somali sheik and of Samburu personally involved in killing him in the 1960s. Viewing the Sheik as a leader who used supernatural powers to orchestrate a bloody massacre, Samburu view his death as emblematic of their resilience in the face of loss—themes that replayed in conflicts in the late 1990s. The Sheik’s family and other Somalis, interpret these events in radically different ways, despite differing only nominally in their factual accounts of what happened. Through a reading of these two accounts—almost identical factually but with very different interpretations--I examine the fundamental misunderstandings through which violence is memorialized and which sow the seeds for future violence.

A Case of Testicles

This chapter focusses on widespread violence that erupted between Samburu and their pastoralist Pokot neighbors, who had been ritually bonded as friends and allies since beyond living memory. While the conflict had many causes, Pokot explanations focus passionately on a single atrocity—the castration of a Pokot man killed in cold blood in the aftermath of an early skirmish, and the impossibility of peace until his testicles were somehow returned. Given this colorful yet one-dimensional explanation of a complex conflict, I consider the similarities and differences between this and classic propaganda, which is seen as frequently underlying war in state organized violence.

Introduction

The introduction sets the stage for a multi-sited, multi-vocal ethnography of violence in northern Kenya. It outlines the basic subject matter for the book, which are stories from each side of a set of conflicts between Samburu herders and several neighboring groups with whom they oscillate between peaceful co-existence and lethal violence. It introduces a theoretical approach to the cultural study of violence emphasizing the interaction of a shifting triad of perpetrators, victims and observers, as well as the methodological and analytical issues incumbent in ethnography that seeks to take seriously the intrinsically conflicting accounts of participants on both sides of violent encounters.

Bad Friends and Good Enemies

This chapter examines the triad of Samburu, Pokot and Turkana in their oscillations between peaceful neighbors and deadly adversaries. Specifically, I explore the ironic conundrum that despite long-term, ritual bonds between Pokot and Samburu. interaction and affection between the groups is modest. In contrast, Samburu and Turkana have long engaged in both sporadic and devastating incidents of deadly warfare, yet maintain close interrelationships and relatively high levels of affection. Considering the ways in which peace and war are mediums for refracting identities I further critically consider the truism that if people only got to know each other they would not fight; Instead sometimes groups fight not because they do not know each other but because they do.

Views on a Massacre

This chapter focuses on the Kenyan government, an often-absent player in these conflicts. Easily the strongest local military force, it frequently sits on the sidelines or participates in ways counter to their role as the insurer of peace. Local actors accept the principle of the government as the agent of order, and narratives of violence are sculpted bring the government to one’s side or conversely to avoid its wrath. However, in practice the government is frequently viewed as negligent or even as perpetrators. Thus, the chapter explores how the diverse ways that local actors understand both the principle of government and its actual actions that may be contrary to this principle, are fundamental to making sense of these conflicts.

Being There, Being Friends, Being Uncertain

Organized around an incident of violence, rife with ambiguity, in which I was tangentially at risk, I consider the extent to which uncertainty is more than a characteristic of fieldwork and of the texts produced by it. Rather, as ethnographers working in contexts of violence, we document uncertainty as the material of our accounts. Thus, my own uncertainty about how close I may have come to being inadvertently killed in this particular incident is far less important than the fact that intrinsic to the lives of my interlocutors is the uncertainty of being unable to fully explain why the violent events described in this book occur, who is responsible and how and when this may directly affect their own lives.

Conclusion

This conclusion draws on diverse comparisons--Tim O’Brien’s notion of a “true war story,” the Rigoberta Menchu controversy, and tropes used to justify the Holocaust—to consider the place of “Truth” in conflicting narratives of violence. These narratives are important in fomenting and interpreting violence irrespective of objective truthfulness. Yet the agnostic approach to truth that this pushes us towards may become a morally unacceptable disservice to the victims of violence. I thus reflect on the varying stories of violence from northern Kenya that contain varying mixtures of truth and falsehood, suggesting that ultimately we are left in the conundrum of unattainable truth, at the same time accepting that clearly truth does matter to the victims of war.

Green Stomachs, Mau Mau, and the Government of Women

This chapter focuses on conflicts between Samburu and Kikuyu agriculturalists, highlighting the role that memory plays in fomenting and structuring violence. Unpacking clashes that erupted in 1998, Samburu argue that these conflicts are rooted Kikuyu hatred for them based in their assistance to the colonial government in suppressing of the Mau Mau in the 1950s. Kikuyu, however, are bewildered that events that long ago events could motivate a recent conflict, instead emphasizing the incompatibility of Samburu as neighbors to those striving towards national and global visions of development. The differing versions of this conflict, and the meaning of the past in it, thus, speak past each other despite forming a shared discursive that ultimately led to violence.