For Money and Elders by Robert W. Blunt

Author:Robert W. Blunt [Blunt, Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Religion, Ethnic & Tribal, History, Africa, East
ISBN: 9780226655895
Google: OfuwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-11-20T04:16:59+00:00

5

“Satan Is an Imitator”:

Kenya’s Recent Cosmology of Corruption

In this and the following chapter, I look at what happens when Kenyatta’s patronage system, which elevated elders to purveyors of value and made Kenyatta himself elder amongst elders, begins to fall apart. In a sense, this collapse was inevitable, inasmuch as it depended on a continuous flow of money and resources from outside the system. As thahu had been for his predecessors, the power of money was something that was more corralled than created. Major cracks began to emerge when Daniel arap Moi succeeded Kenyatta in 1978. As the global political-economic context changed over the coming decade, the contradictions of the patronage system became more and more evident. With the end of the Cold War and the cessation of its attendant resource flows, fights over resources became severe. These fights took the form of ethnic conflict, but again, much of what was at stake was the disintegration of a cross-ethnic gerontocratic system.

This chapter is particularly concerned with the resurgence of fakes—a problem Kenyatta hoped to solve by restoring the generative capacity of elders, their “truth,” as it were. As I have shown, though, his system actually promoted a kind of “illicit conviviality,” in which citizens winked at the failures of their leaders, as long those leaders continued to act as sources of value. As time went on, the Kenyan state became an entity experienced by the majority of its citizens as “overempowered and excessively penetrative” on one hand (Karlstrom 2003, 104) but also impotent on the other. It could organize violence, but it failed to provide even the most basic of services. Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou (1999) have described this as the increasing “criminalization” of the African state under neoliberal conditions, although such a term seems too blunt in the Kenyan context, taking recourse in a normative referent of legality. Under the neoliberal conditions of the 1990s, the capacities of Kenya’s political patrons began to seriously fail, and they resorted evermore to tactics that were more criminal in the Lockean sense. State agents began actively counterfeiting the state’s key symbols and political processes. At the same time, though, they retained their “face value” in state fetishes like money. This contradiction created a good deal of social anxiety. For some, the state’s capacity to ensure a stable relationship between meaning and value became a utopian ideal, never to be achieved. Others started to doubt both the value of the national currency and the substance of elderhood that supposedly grounded it. Others still began to experience and perceive the patronage gift as a literal devil’s pact.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, there was a proliferation of various pamphlets, booklets, and speech genres announcing an impending apocalypse. Some were secular, some religious. All were concerned with the increasing problem of simulation and fakery. In some ways, the anxiety was provoked by neoliberal reforms. One of the conditions of neoliberal structural adjustment was the floating of the Kenyan shilling. Although its value had always depended on external factors, this change highlighted the fact and definitively cut it off from local, visible forms of substance.

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