Kenya’s Muslim population has “long experienced political and economic marginalization” says Samar Al-Bulushi, anthropologist and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, United States and the War on Terror. Samar traces a rather under-explored contemporary history; that of Kenya’s role in the US-led War on Terror. The book investigates the ways in which Kenya emerges as a significant geopolitical player during the first two decades of the 21st century. With the US outsourcing its wars, Kenya was molded into a willing and violent partner in counter-terrorism programs.
At the heart of Samar’s book are Kenyan Muslims—the real subjects of counter-terrorism policies, and the militarism, surveillance and policing that it sets in motion. She explains that “Kenya is not a site of drone strikes. It’s not a site of US bombing. It’s a site of much more mundane daily policing.” But these forms of policing have profoundly destabilizing effects. Just as US counter-terrorism policies have waged a war against Muslims globally, so too has Kenya but on a local level. Samar’s research urges for a clearer and granular understanding of these linked US-Kenyan histories.
“We’re looking at 20 years of specialized police bodies that are accountable to no one, that operate in a very similar way to the ICE agents that we’re seeing deployed on the streets of L.A., D.C., and across the United States today. They’re not uniformed. They operate in vehicles that are unmarked so they can appear out of nowhere, no warning, knocking down doors, shooting people in their beds in the middle of the night.”
“And that,” Samar says, “is a dramatic change in terms of the experiences of Kenyan Muslims.”
It took several years of research for Samar to excavate these histories and to map them along a historical, geographical and cultural spectrum. Samar worked in the field of international human rights, and was with a group called the International Center for Transitional Justice when the Kenyan election violence of 2007 and 2008 shook the nation. “I was struck by the fact that all of my colleagues immediately jumped because so much of the violence had been perpetrated by the Kenyan police.” However, they also started offering “very prescriptive solutions for Kenya, one of the core ones being police reform.”
This was also exactly the moment that the US military command for Africa (AFRICOM) was being launched. Samar started to ask what “it would mean to put Kenya and the United States in a single analytic frame to be thinking about imperial entanglements.”
Samar spent a lot of time conducting research in Mombasa and the Kenyan coast, and she was invited into the intimate space of families whose relatives have been detained, disappeared and tortured. She also conducted interviews with activists who have been at the forefront of local organizing against these dangerous and often unlawful policies. These are touching stories that Samar places right at the beginning of each chapter thus humanizing and enlivening what is a scholarly, dense and theoretically challenging book. Samar found that these histories go far back to colonial times and to the early era of decolonization, but realized that an enormous cultural apparatus allows for these stories to remain under-reported and thus, for the most part, concealed. Kenya “has presented itself on the global stage as a peaceful country…as a leader…as modern, as civilized, cosmopolitan; every conceivable frame that will ensure that there’s little to no scrutiny.”
But the moment for scrutiny has arrived. As Kenya enters one of its most turbulent moments in recent history with the Gen-Z protests against the financial and economic policies of President William Ruto, police brutality and horrific policing methods are now in the limelight. Ruto can’t simply be replaced because “we would simply have business as usual with a new face.” Samar believes that the protesters need to broaden their understanding of Kenya’s history while also building solidarities with similar movements worldwide.
One such learning moment presented itself with the deployment of Kenyan police to stabilize Haiti. On the one hand, they might simply be following American orders. On the other hand, with the Kenyan government cynically invoking the language of Pan-Africanism to justify this deployment might, in fact, “opens the door for both Kenyans and Haitians to be learning more about each other’s histories and struggles against colonialism and imperialism.” Samar insists, optimistically: “There will always be that spirit, right?”
Further reading:
War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror by Samar Al-Bulushi https://www.sup.org/books/politics/war-making-worldmaking
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