Skip to footer

Blissful are Kenya’s peacemakers

A history of election violence has led to grassroots efforts – sermons, prayers, caravans, and art – to calm people after the Aug. 9 election.

|
AP
A Kenyan woman walks past a mural in Nairobi calling for peace during the Aug. 9 presidential election.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

Journalists often focus on the conflict of elections, yet in a welcome change, a big story in Kenya before last week’s presidential election was a grassroots effort to keep the peace, both before and after the Aug. 9 vote.

One reason peacemaking in Kenya was news is that memories remain fresh about the hundreds of people killed after elections in 2007 and 2017 amid ethnic-driven violence over allegations of vote-rigging. “The first thing that matters the most to Kenyans,” said Amriya Issa, a member of Sisters Without Borders, “is maintaining peace during the electioneering period.”

It has taken a range of activists, from artists to religious leaders, to remind Kenyans where peace comes from. “Let us remember that peace starts with me and we have no other country to run to other than Kenya,” Jennifer Riria, chairperson of the Women Mediators Network, told the Daily Nation.

Political violence is still possible after last week’s election. On Monday, a few hundred people stormed the streets of Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, after the head of the election commission announced that candidate Raila Odinga had lost to rival William Ruto by a slim margin. Yet the next day, Mr. Odinga urged supporters to keep calm and not “take the law into their own hands” even as he made a legal challenge to the official count. The tightness of the final tally may lead to disruptions, the Eurasia Group consultancy said in a note, but “widespread unrest remains unlikely.”

To the credit of Kenya’s peacemakers, the European Union praised the “peaceful atmosphere” during the campaign. Efforts to prevent violence began in earnest last April during the Easter season. Clergy united to give sermons about peace as part of daily life. 

“Let’s not use words to insult people, words that are going to discourage someone, but uplifting words. And let us be truthful and moderate in all we do,” said Anglican Church of Kenya Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit in one sermon.

Other actions included a campaign by artists in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum area, to display works that celebrate the country’s ethnic diversity. One group of activists organized a “peace caravan” across the country carrying messages about remaining calm during the heated election.

The Inter-Religious Council of Kenya trained young people on how not to be exploited by politicians and how to react wisely to falsehoods on social media. The National Youth Council held a prayer day to encourage peace promotion. The EU paid for a “hackathon” to develop ways on mobile phones to build peace.

Kenya’s expanding network of peace activists may be a model for other democracies – including the United States. For now at least, it is simply as newsworthy as the Kenyan election itself.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Blissful are Kenya’s peacemakers
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2022/0816/Blissful-are-Kenya-s-peacemakers
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe