Growing up in the 80s, the otherwise silent hours between 4 pm and 6 am were permeated with the hiss of the transistor radio as my dad searched the airwaves for news channels. In those evenings and early mornings in our semi-urban home, the transistor radio was the closest comparison to the rural African homestead fireplace, where kids congregated for the oral storytelling tradition by elders. Through the hiss of the radio, his faithful stack of daily newspapers, and the highly political Weekly Review magazine, my dad — an unapologetic fighter for social justice and an avid consumer of news — would explain different news items on conflicts around the world to me and help me locate the countries involved on a map. By age 10, my vocabulary was rich with notorious names like Kampuchea, CONTRA, RENAMO, Noriega and Mandela. I knew countless countries, along with their presidents and capital cities. I drew and painted prodigiously. I developed a voracious appetite for 500-page novels, which I’d devour in just three days. Through my humble childhood immersed in the deep end of geography, history and current affairs, my dad was slowly shaping my journey into peacebuilding.
In 2004, after completing my university degree in sociology and interning at a media company, I settled in Eldoret Town, then a rapidly expanding commercial center in the mainly agricultural Uasin-Gishu grain basket. In 2007, the region became the epicenter of Kenya’s worst episode of politically instigated inter-ethnic upheaval. The scale of post-election violence challenged my years of experience as a son, cartoonist, and social scientist. It activated the peacebuilder instincts that had lain dormant in me. As those dark days of 2007-08 went by, I observed correlations between the violence and prior events that had drawn my attention. I recognized the missed conflict warning signs that had left Kenya on the brink of violence. I highlighted these in an exhibition of my cartoon drawings. The deaths, anguish and destruction I witnessed first-hand were seared into my memory and conscience. I regretted that I hadn’t been in a position to alert the larger society and especially authorities to the social dissonance I saw on the ground prior to and during the violence.
In 2010, I became a Peace Monitor in Narok, another grain basket and conflict hotspot. Narok has come to define my career and life experience. In Narok, I adopted Conflict Early Warning and Early Response as my peacebuilding standpoint and mantra after successful experiments, and that’s why I wanted to write a blog on the localization debate and how it is overly dominated by the Global North-South power dichotomy. Hopefully, my experiences will allow us to think about ‘localization’ from a different and bottom-up viewpoint — the grassroots community level.
This blog is part of CDA’s From Where I Stand series, designed to listen to people most affected by aid as they explore and amplify their leadership experiences, stories, and lessons for the aid sector.
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