Literary life challenging societies that tolerate injustice

Burundians in Nairobi after the Presidents announcement. [File-Standard]

There are moments when a country needs more than laws to examine itself. It needs a mirror.

Sometimes that mirror is history, sometimes a newspaper or a speech, and sometimes, quietly but powerfully, it is literature.

Recent remarks about foreign small scale traders in Kenya, followed by reports of Burundians being harassed and some seeking documents to return home, should concern us beyond the immediate politics of immigration, business permits and work licences.

They should make us ask a more uncomfortable question: What happens to a society when the person who looks, speaks or trades differently is slowly transformed from a neighbour into a problem?

South African writer Phaswane Mpe understood this danger in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, his powerful novel about life in Johannesburg's Hillbrow.

In Mpe's world, foreigners become convenient containers for society's anxieties.

Unemployment, crime, disease, poverty and social decay acquire foreign faces, and the stranger becomes an explanation for everything that has gone wrong.

That is not merely a South African story. It can happen anywhere. It can happen in Nairobi, Kakamega, Kampala, Dar es Salaam or Bujumbura. It begins with language long before it becomes violence.

A people are repeatedly described as outsiders, competitors, invaders or a burden, and slowly the human being disappears behind the label.

Kenya has every right to enforce its laws. Foreign nationals operating businesses must comply with immigration, taxation, labour and licensing requirements, while the government has a responsibility to regulate commerce and protect citizens from unfair competition.

These are legitimate matters of public policy. But there is a profound difference between enforcing the law and creating an atmosphere in which an entire community feels hunted.

The first is governance; the second is xenophobia. The distance between the two can become frighteningly small when political language is handled carelessly.

Chinua Achebe understood the power of language and the danger of reducing human beings to convenient categories. In Things Fall Apart, the arrival of the stranger transforms the moral and political landscape of Umuofia.

Achebe's insight was not simply that outsiders arrive, but that societies become vulnerable when people stop seeing one another as human beings and begin seeing one another through rigid categories of "us" and "them". Frantz Fanon, writing about colonialism, similarly examined how systems of domination teach one group to see another as inferior, threatening or less deserving.

His work reminds us that exclusion does not necessarily disappear when colonial rulers leave. Societies can reproduce the logic of exclusion among themselves.

We should therefore be careful when economic frustration begins looking for a human target. Kenyans are struggling. Small businesses are under pressure, young people are searching for employment, and the cost of living has made survival difficult for many families. Local traders have legitimate complaints about competition, taxation, access to markets and regulation. But blaming an entire nationality for structural economic problems is not economic policy. It is scapegoating. It is easier to say that the foreigner is taking the market than to ask why our economy is failing to create enough opportunities. It is easier to accuse migrants of destroying businesses than to examine access to credit, taxation, corruption, infrastructure, monopolies and the wider structure of the economy.

Literature teaches us to resist such simplicity because the novelist knows that every stranger has a story. The man behind the counter may have left Burundi because he could not find an opportunity at home. The woman selling clothes in Nairobi may be supporting children across the border.

The young man running a small shop may have borrowed money from relatives to establish himself in a country where he believed he could survive. To call them simply "foreigners" may be grammatically correct, but it is morally incomplete. They are people before they are categories.

This is one reason African literature has always been concerned with belonging. Our continent is full of journeys, while many of our borders were drawn by colonial administrations, sometimes cutting through communities that existed long before those lines appeared on maps.

People who share language, culture, ancestry and economic relationships can suddenly become citizens of different states. Yet we have learned to treat these borders as though they were eternal. Kwame Nkrumah understood this contradiction when he imagined an Africa capable of transcending the divisions imposed upon it.

The East African Community is similarly built around the belief that our future is stronger when movement, trade and cooperation become easier rather than more hostile. Kenya has long benefited from movement across borders.

Our own citizens live, study, work and trade in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and many other countries. Kenyan professionals work abroad, entrepreneurs establish businesses abroad and students cross borders in search of education.

We cannot demand dignity for Kenyans abroad while becoming indifferent to the dignity of Africans living among us. What does it say about East African integration when an African neighbour feels safer going home than remaining in another African country?

Wole Soyinka has spent much of his literary life challenging societies that tolerate injustice. His work reminds us that silence can become a form of complicity. We should therefore not wait until a shop is burned, a person beaten or a family driven away before we discover that language matters.

Violence grows in an atmosphere where certain people are repeatedly described as less deserving of protection, where an entire nationality is blamed for problems that have many causes and where suspicion gradually becomes normal. By the time violence arrives, the imagination has already prepared the ground.

This is why literature matters. Politics often demands that we choose sides quickly, but literature asks us to sit with complexity. Politics may say "foreign trader", while literature asks what brought this person here, what he fears, whom he loves and what he hopes for.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has consistently reminded us that language, identity and power are never innocent. The words we use to describe people influence how we imagine them. Once a person has been reduced to a problem, it becomes easier to justify treating that person as a problem.

The tragedy is that xenophobia often presents itself as patriotism. It tells citizens that defending the nation requires hostility towards outsiders. But patriotism does not require hatred. One can love Kenya without hating Burundi.

One can defend Kenyan traders without humiliating Congolese traders. One can insist on immigration laws without stripping migrants of their humanity. A confident nation does not need a scapegoat to prove its strength.

Our problems are real, but they are bigger than the foreigner. Unemployment will not disappear because a Burundian closes a shop. The cost of living will not fall because a Congolese trader leaves Nairobi.

Our young people will not suddenly find jobs because another African community is chased from a market. The harder questions remain: How do we create jobs? How do we make credit accessible? How do we strengthen local enterprises? How do we reduce the cost of doing business? How do we fight corruption and build industries that absorb our young people? These questions require courage. Scapegoating requires very little imagination.

Achebe, Fanon, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, Nkrumah and Mpe, in different ways, asked questions about power, belonging, identity and our human tendency to create outsiders. Their works remain relevant because the stranger is rarely born a stranger. We make him one.

We create the distance, attach labels to people and eventually forget the human being behind the label. Kenya should enforce its laws firmly and fairly, but that enforcement should never become a licence to humiliate, intimidate or attack our African neighbours.

Perhaps this is literature's most important lesson: the stranger is often created in the imagination before he is created in society. Sometimes the stranger is not simply someone who crossed a border.

Sometimes he is someone we have deliberately taught ourselves not to understand. Before we decide that he does not belong here, literature asks us to pause and consider a more difficult question: Who taught us that he was a stranger in the first place?