Tanzania crisis shows old power across EAC has lost youth imaginings

At the risk of sounding sexist in this sensitive era where gender issues easily raise hackles; in the ornate palaces of the Middle East and the Orient, during the Middle Ages, when the Arabic culture was taking shape, one of the most dangerous places to be was the harem. It is in the harem where palace intrigues formented, where murders and mutinies were carefully planned and executed, where empires were made – and toppled. The royal harem women, with time on their hands but constrained of free movement because of their status, were not spending their time stringing beads and fanning themselves in their luxurious chambers, but were plotting all the time, sieving the information they were receiving about the ambitious princes, plotting who would stick their gold-handled dagger in whose back and at what time. 

And the conveyor belts were the eunuchs; perhaps the most dangerous people in the harem, thanks to the access they had to the outside world; the snippets of information they obtained or sneaked out of the palace on their routine visits to the souks. In short, coup d’etats and revolutions were planned in the harem. To get an insight on this, read authors like Colin De Silva and British adventure writer Wilbur Smith, who have written about the Raj and the ancient Swahili sultanates of Lamu and the East African coast in intimate detail.

Looked at from all angles, Tanzania’s ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) has become a microcosm of these Oriental and Middle Eastern castles, complete with the palace squabblings and intrigue, together with the attendant ring-fencing depending on who is benefiting from what. It is a putrid sore that can be gleaned in the eyes of the party loyalists and long-time beneficiaries whenever they argue on the floor of Parliament, and of which young people are saying: enough is enough.

The reason we are talking about the palace intrigues of the Middle East and Asia is that President Suluhu Hassan, who is currently in the limelight thanks to the disputed presidential elections in Tanzania, is Arab and a Muslim from Zanzibar. That island, which became the seat of the Sultanate after her forebearer, Seyid Said, transfered his capital there from Muscat during the Slave Trade years, has a long and colourful history.

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At the pace at which she is going and with the iron fist with which she is increasingly ruling Tanzania, we in Kenya are starting to believe the wild and completely unfounded rumours about how she came to occupy the throne. And her ancestry, coupled with the ruling party CCM’s long history of silk-gloved dictatorship, only help to lend credence to the cloak-and-dagger perception. CCM is the second oldest political party in Africa after the other problematic ancestor, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and it’s attendant Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) mess.

veiled dagger

President Suluhu inherited the giant shoes of the ebullient and bullish “mchapa kazi” John Pombe Maghufuli who was highly rated here in Kenya for the achievements he made in the short time he was at the helm. His revolutionary approach to governance resonated very well especially with youthful Kenyans. Sadly Mama Suluhu is busy rolling those gains back to the cobwebbed annals of conservatism.

JPM might not have been your poster child of democracy. But his failings notwithstanding, those shoes simply won’t be filled by threats and intimidation. The man set the bar high, and the least those coming after him can do is emulate him.

There are those who have questioned Mama Suluhu’s level of education and her grasp of trends in modern regional and global geopolitics in relation to her predecessor, but we won’t navel-gaze, lest we stoop to the level of querulous dagaa traders at the market. It is Tanzanians who know best why they approved her at her vetting.

Jirani

President Suluhu has often queried – and been openly incensed – about why Kenyans are so concerned with the goings-on in her country. The one thing she doesn’t appreciate is that it is not an idle concern of tech-savvy Gen Z’s with smartphones and time on their hands. But regional crisis will soon spread across the border just here in Migori, as expatriates flee and later the insecurity of instability. Our nosiness is also rooted in history.

At one time her native Zanzibari sultanate controlled trade and administration along the entire East African coast and deep into the hinterland as far as the Congo. As a matter of fact the adventurous Europeans would not have managed to penetrate and colonize the African hinterland without the aid of the Arabs. The first stop of those expeditions was always Zanzibar; that is where the European explorers sourced guides, porters and revictualized before they set forth into the unmapped hinterland.

As a matter of fact at some point in history the entire East African coast all the way to Kismayu in Somalia was administered by the Sultan of Zanzibar under a pact entered into with the British and German colonialists. Todate Arabic culture, with it’s umbilical chord embedded in Zanzibar, still holds sway along the entire coastal strip and at the caravan stops deep into the hinterland along the old trading routes. That is why it shouldn’t surprise President Suluhu why Kenyans are poking their noses in the affairs of her country.

And for her information, again digging back into history, her ancestors have a terrible reputation in the hinterland. It is Arab traders, with their dreaded caravans and muskets, who decimated entire villages in the bara on their forays in hunt for slaves and ivory. That is the reason why Zanzibar- and by extension Tanzania bara- is Kenya’s business. And we haven’t mentioned about the long history of cross-border trade we share and the cultural ties we have, with our shared nyumbu(wildebeest) being virtually stateless, defying the line the colonialists drew in the sand whenever it is the season to cross over from the Serengeti National Park to the Maasai Mara to mate and vice versa 

I am informed that there is a settlement somewhere in Tarime across the border where you can find lots of my own native Maragoli people. Some blinkered historians will tell you that these people migrated there from South Nyanza in Kenya. But those who choose to dig deeper will tell you that this was the migratory route of the Maragoli people from their original home in the Great Lakes. As an islander, you might find these details about the bara people intriguing, Mama President, but it will further surprise you to realize that you are presiding over a huge populace of Nguni-speaking Bantu peoples whose origin isn’t even in what we know today as Tanzania; people like the Nyamwezi and Hehe who clearly trace their ancestry further down south. It all depends on where you choose to draw the line back in time.

In addition we studied Shaaban Roberts and were taught about Kinjeketile Ngwale and the Maji Maji rebellion in school, in addition to being bombarded by Mziki wa Dansi on KBC radio in the 1980s; not to mention the safe haven our intellectuals and dissidents found in Dar-es-Salaam when they were hounded out by our own dictator, Moi. We have also married from and are married to your countryfolk, and share an official language- even if our various accents and dialects amuse you greatly. That makes Tanzania our business. You cannot cut those ties with a presidential decree or a rant on a presidential dais.

Cover of feminism?

As the first female president in the region, you cannot distance yourself from the politics of your sex. Like it or not we will sieve you through the prism of your gender, since you are a first. And the question we will ask, from our jaded patriarchal perch, is, is this what the daughters we are raising are capable of when they come into positions of power and leadership? Are they going to destroy what the founding father, Nyerere,  with all his flaws, built, or will they build on it?

You are on the cusp of a crucial definitive era, Madam President. And you don’t have the luxury of choice. The impatient, well-educated but jobless and hungry youths won’t give you that choice. And you need to open your eyes and realize that it is a phenomenon happening continent-wide, all the way from Madagascar to Cameroun. You scoffed at us when it touched on our shores and assumed you were living in an island of serenity. Well, recent events in your country have proved to you that you were wrong. You’ve chosen to spread a shroud over the simmering despondency and are busy sweeping your skulls under the carpet.

Now the choice is yours. Your own Gen Z’s are telling you that you may choose to perch your throne on the blood of their compatriots who the police have been ordered to shoot and maim. Question is, for how long?

We think you and Tanzanians will have to wake up and accept that you have been living a lie; massaging a lump in the armpit. That the time has come to lance it and confront the odious truth. That is what your Gen Z’s are demanding on the streets.

And for your information, their fellow youths over here in Kenya are alert, going by what they are posting online. They are saying that if anyone is thinking of escaping the powderkeg you are stoking into hiding in Kenya they will track them down and send them back home to face justice. That they are fully aware of the dubious distinction their capital, Nairobi, has of offering a safe haven for people with blood on their hands fleeing conflicts they started in their own countries. That they will fix that. And it is not an idle threat.