For example, the New York Times’ correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman went on about ‘an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya ..’
He’s been writing like that since before the elections. However, they have not had it their own way. It is true that Gettleman’s own paper offered space to Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina to set the record straight. But that’s one Wainaina piece (or anything offering a counter-narrative) to Gettleman’s daily tribal drumbeat.
Nevertheless there is a counter-narrative slowly filtering through: on websites, blogs and cellphones or even internet-only initiatives linked to mainstream sites (such as the UK Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ initiative where commentators such as Wainaina, Richard Dowden, Dowden again, Meera Seval, and Victoria Brittain (admittedly, mainly Europeans, but at least they are informed) provided some good analysis and historical context about the long-standing and more recent causes of the tragic outbreak of violence (which should be condemned at all cost) over the last few weeks.
‘… I’ve enjoyed watching the subtle interactions that place between the growing pool of competitors for the most shocking photo, the saddest story, the most heroic reporting. We drive from one lynching to another, from burnt churches to dispersed rallies, like children chasing marbles. It takes a fair amount of cynicism to fly around the world just to watch people’s lives fall apart. I spoke with one photographer, for instance, moments after he’d returned from a riot in Mathare; he was heart-broken, not by what he saw, but because he had put his camera on the wrong setting and none of the bodies he had photographed turned out well.’
You can read the whole thing here.
