A few days ago, I was at a private bluesky event on the edge of Nairobi, where about a dozen of some of the brightest East African minds were gathered.
At one point, I was sitting in the garden with a Kenyan economist and researcher working at an American university and a Ugandan political scientist and writer who is doing a regional project for a rich Western philanthropy. Because they don’t want to be identified, we shall call the Kenyan KEcon and the Ugandan UGPol.
As they say, it started innocently. KEcon is also a big rugby fan. UGPol is very knowledgeable on social movements in East Africa—nay, Africa—and keeps a close eye on Ethiopia and Rwanda.
Yours Truly, for the conversation that unfolded, and is heavily abbreviated here, is COO.
KEcon set things rolling with a comment on the recent Rugby World Cup in France that was won by the South African national side Springboks, for the third time.
KEcon: I am glad the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup again but I’m surprised they did. If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have wagered that Kenya would have been in France.
COO: Wow, that’s a leap of faith. Things have been rather quiet on the Kenyan national rugby front internationally lately.
KEcon: Yes, but in 2012-2013, remember Shujaa (Kenya rugby sevens team) had its best World Series, finishing fifth. The vibe was so good we dared dream they would touch the sky.
KEcon: There is a declinist narrative around South Africa. The ANC has run the country down. It is an uneasy place and you saw the nationwide looting of July 2021. That environment tends to drag everything down.
COO: You are giving credence to the whispered story that rugby is representative of white South Africa, which has become a fairly successful enclave society amidst the decay.
UGPol: In 2012, the most successful East Africa decade had ended. The years between 2000 and 2010 were special in these parts. That was when Kenya got the moniker “The Silicon Savannah” and I remember you made some news with cricket.
KEcon: Yes, Kenya put in its best performance at the Cricket World Cup in 2003, when it reached the semi-finals.
COO: Because football and athletics are the mainstay sports in these parts, are we saying the success of sports that are niche, like cricket and rugby, are an indicator of a wave of national excellence?
KEcon: Yes, with football, relatively more resources and national passions are already invested in them; so rugby, tennis, cricket, swimming...those are the ones that signal new pools of creativity.
UGPol: I think many regional developments helped the Kenyan rise. In 2005, Uganda returned to multiparty politics, although it removed presidential terms limits as the price. In Rwanda in April 2000, Paul Kagame became President. That was significant because it signalled the end of the ‘Band-Aid’ post-genocide period and [start of] the building phase, which has taken the country to where it is. I also believe that the reconstruction of Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi—an iron-fisted chap I am not embarrassed to admit I admired a lot—created regional ripples that we haven’t been thankful enough for.
COO: President Mwai Kibaki, who took over in Kenya [in 2002], needs to be credited too. He made government and politics boring and pulled Kenya, which had one foot in the grave, back to the land of the living.
KEcon: In Kenya, there was a big return home of some of the best minds in the country who were exiled or living abroad due to the last difficult years of the Kanu government. But, mostly, I think all that Silicon Savannah stuff was a revolution carried out by Kenyan middle-class children parents had unleashed from the cages that they locked them away for security.
COO: There is the view that the post-election violence of 2007-2008 in Kenya was the shock, the fire that shattered complacent Kenyan exceptionalism and unleashed new imagination. Do you agree?
KEcon: Hehe, we are a forgetful people then. Look at us in the past 10 years; the lessons of that period have been forgotten.
UGPol: I also find that we don’t pay enough attention to how Tanzania influences the region. Jakaya Kikwete, whatever his faults, brought a new internationalism to Tanzania that is not appreciated. He might not have been a great East African integrationist but one day we will judge him kindly.
KEcon: Yes, and we can’t underestimate the importance of the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Naivasha in January 2005 by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the Government of Sudan. Or, indeed, the Somalia transitional charter signed by Kenya a year earlier. Nobody expected it would make a difference but a seed was planted; that Somalia would one day overcome. At the time, it was close to a miracle.
- Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". @cobbo3
