Negative Ethnicity

""An acute and impassioned observer, one of Africa's greatest men of courage, Koigi wa Wamwere tells a riveting story of coming of age in his native Kenya with fire, anger, and vigorous joy in life."" ""Not since the great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's The Man Died has such a raw and searing portrait of Africa been drawn, with such stark colors and contrasts. It should be required reading for every American school-child, or at the very least, every Black school-child."" ""This strange and powerful work mixes memoir, social history, polemic, and manifesto. Its basic structure is autobiographical, but wa Wamwere frequently interrupts with Kenyan history, ethnography, folk tales, poetry, fables, parables, songs, and laments for lost friends and lost causes....A terrifying work of enormous importance that contrasts humanity with bestiality, dignity with depravity."" Westerners have some knowledge of the twin African scourges of AIDS and apartheid. However, whether because it is too bloody, its campaigns too unthinkably brutal, or because of sheer racism, the terror of ethnic cleansing is passed over. Himself a veteran of decades of ethnic violence in Kenya, his homeland, wa Wamwere both describes what he has seen, and recounts the stories of horror that others have told him--of genocide by machete in Rwanda, in Sudan, in Liberia, in Nigeria, in Algeria, in Uganda, in Burundi, in Angola, in Somalia, in Sierra Leone, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Better than any observer could who is insulated by barriers of privelege or nationality, wa Wamwere, a laborer's son, explains the virulence of ethnic hatred in Africa, dating to the colonial period and before. The culprits are many: chronic poverty; a broken education system; preying dictators; corrupt officials; the colonial legacy of hate. Wa Wamwere describes how African cultures have changed to reinforce the cycle of ethnic bigotry, through language, stereotyping and class conflict. Finally, wa Wamwere takes the West to task for failing to intervene in Africa, while rushing to quell similar, though less deadly, conflicts in Europe; and for contributing to Africa's problems through cynical power-brokering and parasitic investment practices.