Reflections on the tyranny of evidence (LONG READ)

​In January 2008, at the height of the post election violence, I penned a blog post, then at Zeleza Post, in which I voiced my shock at seeing African intellectuals justifying the violence in the country. In that post, I intended to argue that whatever political side we were sympathetic to, our obligation as intellectuals was to affirm freedom and life. For that reason, I said, it was possible to defend life and argue that no election, no matter how flawed, was worth the loss of life.

To my shock, I was attacked for taking PNU's side. One academic, not a Kenyan, even attacked me as a “Kibaki intellectual” and seemed to have been so bothered to find out my ethnicity, but not my gender, because he kept referring to me as “he.” ​That blog post has entered academic studies on Kenya’s post-election violence of 2007 as evidence of how intellectuals offered “problematic” support for election rigging. 

​Never in my life, did I imagine that in the name of democracy, a massive fraud would be committed against the Kenyan people with the participation of the international community. The Kenyatta oligarchy, having bought the complicity of the international community through inviting them to buy into the privatization of our schools and hospitals, turned against the Kenyan people and made international players like UNDP, John Kerry and the Carter Center cheer them along. Never has the victory of racism been so complete in Kenya. It has made the world expect so little of Africans that they do not care whether the freedom we have is genuine, or whether the elections are fairly done.