DIY violence is corrosive of nationhood

It is not often that participants in ethnic cleansing confess to it openly, but William ole Ntimama has managed it twice: in a 1996 interview, and more recently. The brazenness of the impunity is revolting: it is natural to want accountability and reform, and equally natural to think we can have both. This, unfortunately, is a bit of a farce: stable reform and calling the violent to account are incompatible.

I defend the view that we can have one and only one of reform or accountability.

The Ambassador is recalled

But all said and done, Mr. Kiplagat is not a Desmond Tutu. Whereas Archbishop Tutu put his all on the line to defend human rights, Mr. Kiplagat has never stuck out his neck to defend them. As a diplomat he defended the excesses of the KANU regime. Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Ouko was murdered in 1990 when he was PS Foreign Affairs.

Omtata Okoiti doesn't rate Truth Commissions or Bethuel Kiplagat; he stops by to explain.

Readerless Kenyans

This is absurd, and laughable - the appeal ascribed to writers (assuming there was ever such) is akin to a tea farmers association's pushing the government and tea producers to promote tea drinking among the population because the habit of tea drinking benefits tea growers (we're an agrarian society, after all, and it would seem natural for writers to borrow from a farmer's approach to marketing).

Henry Gekonde returns: some astringent thoughts on the lack of a reading culture in Kenya follow.

Watu Wazima: A gender analysis of forced male circumcisions during Kenya's post-election violence.

We're delighted to have managed to get Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, of akilidada fame, onto our pages. Her new piece is a gender-analytic look at forced male circumcisions during PEV. As she says herself, if asked what gender analysis has for men, a piece like this would have to figure.

What does it mean to be an African lesbian?

Read as Sokari Ekine profiles South African photo activist Zanele Mutholi. Read and take a look at these powerful images.

Zanele's photographic work challenges the many stereotypes of African womanhood, femininity, masculinity and victimhood often displayed by the media both on the continent and abroad. At the same time she allows herself - and us - to celebrate not just our bodies but what they do and give to us.

"African Blood" Saved Obama From Scrutiny in Ghana

Ombuya E. Okong'o   argues that Obama, in his policies towards Africa, is no different than his predecessors. He says because of Obama's ancestry, Africans have failed to ask tougher questions, and have a very narrow definition of their expectations of him. In his criticism of the continent, Obama is as patronizing as they come.

Do you agree? Read more, and engage.

Triumph of Hague-Option Proponents? Not Quite!

And, with commendable speed, Henry Gekonde responds to Annan's move: his view, carefully argued, is that the prospect of the Hague is insufficient to end the deadlock in Parliament; and that that state of affairs suits our political elite just fine.

Annan hands over the names

BBC reports that Annan has handed over the names:

In a statement from Geneva, Mr Annan said he welcomed Kenya's efforts to establish a special tribunal, but added that "any judicial mechanism adopted to bring the perpetrators of the post-election violence to justice must meet international legal standards and be broadly debated with all sectors of the Kenyan society in order to bring credibility to the process".

More as soon as we know it.

Is the Mau Mau compensation lawsuit worth the trouble?

Alex returns to our pages with a new piece about the Mau Mau -- one of his specialist subjects. Rather surprisingly, he thinks the lawsuit not a very good idea.

Midweek miscellany

The latest Foreign Policy Failed States Index is here (interactive, so may take a little while to load) and Kenya has made it to number 14. It seems a good time, then, to point out the methodological flaws, and Richard Just obliges at the TNR, even relying on Kenya as his counterexample.

This will inevitably come off as special pleading, but he does have a point.

State failure is said in many ways: Kenya is failing mostly because it has a murderously divided elite, Burma is failing because it has a murderously unified totalitarian elite. And his point about the different (unweighted!) criteria pulling in different directions is quite sound. But from the consumer side, so to speak, there's an even more serious difficulty. If you're reading the Index, you're wanting to find out how likely a given state is to fail in the medium term or you're looking for a rough guide to the distribution of some civil and personal freedoms across states. Burma and North Korea are relatively-efficient totalitarian regimes. While they'll eventually fall, their medium-term survival prospects are very good. By contrast, Kenya medium-term survival prospects aren't. The index is useless for that. Again, there's no useful ranking by political freedom which puts Kenya anywhere near Burma or North Korea: our state, while amazingly crap, leaves us relatively free. Either way, the ranking is basically useless.

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Years ago, I discovered Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life when I was looking for a second-hand book to read on a flight home, and I've been more or less a fan ever since -- not least because it proved that philosophy undergraduates can have love-lives.

Caleb Crain reviewed de Botton's latest in the New York Times, and de Botton's response in comments at Crain's blog has to be seen to be believed. The vehemence of the thing is completely unexpected, and a little admirable. Despite de Botton's contrition afterwards (see his twitter account) my sympathy is with him.

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Via Aleksandra Gadzala - always sharp, always informative - Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai has managed to get a $950 million loan off China. Aleksandra also had a really interesting article about Chinese business networks in Kenya: one of her more dismaying findings is that Kenyans' ethnic divisions make it harder for them to compete against Chinese business.