april 5, 2015: last friday i was interviewed by the brilliant Theodore Forsyth of rochester indymedia about my new documentary A THIN WALL. we talked at length about how, in the 20th century, colonial empires drew lines across maps all over the world and how many of these newly created nation-states did not originate in any kind of indigenous logic. i mentioned the continent of africa in particular where random borders have unleashed secessionist movements and perennial conflict. we also discussed the impact of colonial censuses and surveys which were meant to catalog colonized land, natural resources and people but which were so much more than statistical tables. they categorized diverse populations into inflexible silos that eventually congealed into distinct, discrete and antagonistic communities. this is the backdrop to the partition of india. it comes back to haunt us over and over again, in every part of the post-partition world. pls watch this excellent documentary for some clarity on kenya.
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Kenya’s North Eastern Province, the country’s third-largest region, borders Somalia and is exclusively inhabited by ethnic Somalis. Following Kenya’s independence 50 years ago, it emerged as a distinctive administrative entity. Given to Kenya by British colonialists, the area has long been the site of ethnic tensions and violence targeting the Kenyan-Somali population – much of it ordered by Nairobi. Economically strangled by Nairobi’s political and military might, life there is a struggle. Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow is from this part of Kenya and has lived through the massacres and systematic intimidation by the Kenyan authorities. For “Not Yet Kenyan” he goes back to see how the region and his people have come through the pogroms and started to prosper only to find that al-Shabab has established a stronghold in the region and is now throwing it into a new chapter of turmoil.