Kenyans dig deep to grow peace

In a sun-drenched valley of central Kenya, a few dozen villagers gather each Saturday to sit under the trees and conduct the painstaking work of reconciliation that their government leaders seem happy to avoid.

These traumatized victims of Kenya’s post-election clashes meet to talk, pray, sing and -- they hope -- heal. More than half a dozen tribes are represented, including some that attacked one another in the weeks after the disputed December 2007 presidential voting ignited long-simmering ethnic tensions. More than 1,000 Kenyans died in the clashes.

At most sessions, group members still segregate themselves by tribe. But singing, dancing and a touch of pragmatism have helped break the ice.

Paskwaloena Wanjiru, 70, was leery at first of joining the group. Her son and grandson were killed by a mob from a rival tribe and she didn’t think she could she bring herself to greet members of that tribe.

But she was also struggling with her own secret shame: Two other sons took part in killing and house-burning that targeted another local tribe.

Eventually she said she became comfortable with joining the reconciliation group because “we are all here for the right reasons: to forgive and to be forgiven.”

Gathering under a village’s biggest tree to sort out conflict is an ancient African tradition, one that has even been used to promote healing in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

But such scenes have been surprisingly rare in Kenya, which historically liked to boast that it had avoided the sort of ethnic war that gripped its neighbors. Rather than confront the roots of the violence, many in Kenya now seem willing to paper over their differences and pretend nothing happened.

In November, legislation was approved to create a commission for tackling the nation’s underlying tribal tensions, but commission members have yet to be named and work has not begun. Many officials refuse to even acknowledge the need for reconciliation.

Although the violence began Dec. 27, 2007, as a political power struggle, it quickly morphed into disputes over land and natural resources. Neighbors attacked neighbors; friends betrayed friends.

A power-sharing agreement between incumbent Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga quelled the violence, but since then only a few perpetrators have been punished. Promised $140 compensation payments for victims have been distributed sporadically, at best. Most displaced families say they are too afraid to return home.

“You can’t just tell people to go home,” said human rights activist Maximilla Winfred Okello, who started the grass-roots reconciliation meetings in the Rift Valley town of Rumuruti during the fall. “It won’t work if people are still afraid of their neighbors.”

She said that unless Kenyans were encouraged to express their anger and learn to trust one another again, the nation was destined to repeat the violence.

“It’s the circle of conflict,” she said. “The government is still in denial.”

On the one-year anniversary of the election, Okello and her group marked the occasion with a performance of traditional peace songs, one from each tribe.

Members of the Luhya tribe, dressed in grass skirts, danced in a conga line, twisting their bodies and chanting softly. Hip-swinging Kikuyu women, in bright-colored wraps, sang of reconciliation. Kalenjin girls yelped a haunting duet while Turkana mothers, bedecked in multicolored beads, shook metal medallions sewn onto their dresses like tambourines.

Though these tribes have lived side by side for generations, most villagers at the gathering said they’ve rarely participated in such cultural exchanges. Several were inspired watching the other tribes perform and leaped up to join in.

“I just had to stand up and dance,” said Esther Evaiyo, 50, a mother of eight.

Her Turkana village was set ablaze in the middle of the night in March by Kalenjin mobs, but when Kalenjin members of the group performed recently, she danced with them.

When she first joined the group, she could barely bring herself to look at the Kalenjin. “Now,” she said, “we are bonding.”

Okello, a high school teacher with peace-building training, got the idea to launch the group after working door to door after the riots to encourage parents to bring children back to school.

Like dozens of other Kenyan cities, this community was torn apart by violence in March, when 25 people were killed and 8,000 left homeless.

At first, Okello couldn’t persuade people to attend. As soon as members of one tribe saw another, they would storm away in anger, with some shouting, “You burned our houses!” and “You killed us!”

After weeks of prodding, representatives from all the major tribes sat together on a big blanket on a grassy patch in the center of town. She calls the group “Mama Amani,” or “Mother of Peace.”

Okello insists that everyone speak Kiswahili, the national language, rather than their tribal tongues. Often members privately share their experiences, but Okello said emotions were still too raw for public testimonials, which she fears might lead to finger-pointing. “We’re not ready for that,” Okello said.

She compared her work to a theater group in which actors put on happy-face masks. Eventually she’ll ask them to take off the masks, and by then, she hopes, a part of the happy face “will have become that person.”

Peter Lolino, 28, a flower farm worker who has been attending the sessions since the fall, said the group helped him deal with the anger he felt after he was struck in the face by an arrow.

As he recovered in a hospital, he plotted his revenge against those who assaulted him. But talks with his pastor and the weekly Mama Amani meetings persuaded him to work instead toward forgiveness.

Recently, he confronted the neighbors who attacked him, told them he forgave them and moved his family back to his land, though he still has no money to rebuild his charred house and is living in a temporary shack. He said a lighter heart was better than revenge.

“I realized the best thing for me is just to forgive,” said Lolino, whose gaunt face bears two round scars where the arrow penetrated. “Even if the government gave us something, that’s not going to matter if we haven’t forgiven.”

Erza Orina, 20, looks at the group for support, like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or a Sunday sermon. “This is like church for us,” said Orina, whose clothing shop was looted and burned.

Sometimes he can feel the anger boil inside him, such as the day when he saw a young woman of a rival tribe wearing a shawl stolen from his shop. At first, he said, he felt like ripping it off her back, but instead he vented with friends at the next meeting.

“They encourage me to be strong,” he said.

As a recent meeting concluded, Okello led the group through an exercise intended to promote reconciliation. Members of rival tribes were asked to exchange tree seedlings with one another to serve as symbols of their commitment to nurture ethnic harmony.

“Now go out,” Okello told departing participants with saplings hugged to their chests, “and plant some peace.”

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edmund.sanders@latimes.com