Kenya: The Unseen Danger in Political Violence

The blood of 25 fresh corpses a day soaks into Kenya’s soil. Since a fraudulent election on December 27, violent protests and deadly attacks have forced over 300,000 Kenyans from their homes and ruined the national economy.

Yesterday the death toll in the violence passed 1,000 people. Both sides in the conflict are forming militias, possibly aided by organized crime. Two opposition lawmakers have been assassinated. In the name of political freedom, Kenyans are burning each other’s businesses and hacking each other to death with machetes.

“Kibaki’s government will never work in Kenya,” said one protester of the president he now views as illegitimate. “We will paralyze them even if they kill our leaders.”

Hope for a return to normalcy is evaporating with the smoke rising from the Kenyan landscape.

Anxious outsiders are threatening to “impose a solution.”

Therein lies a critical lesson. It is a lesson that hits far closer to home than the affluent, complacent West would think.

In other recent African trouble spots, slow Western reaction enabled problems to balloon into catastrophes. Think Rwanda, Congo, Darfur. In Kenya, the West may swoop in quicker not only to secure a more favorable judgment from history, but also because Kenya is far more economically important than those other areas.

Long viewed as an oasis of relative stability in East Africa, Kenya has courted significant foreign investment and positioned itself as a hub for trade, finance and oil exploration in the region. The recent chaos has disrupted trade routes into Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Left unchecked, it could decimate those economies as well as Kenya’s own. Many foreign nations are vested in preventing such fallout.

Consider this, however. If other nations intervene, it will mean adding Kenya to an already lengthy African to-do list. The United Nations’ peacekeeping forces are crawling all over Kenya’s troubled neighborhood. The UN sponsors a remarkable eight missions in Africa, and the growing numbers of blue helmets will soon reach record numbers. Africa presently demands the attention of two thirds of all UN forces in the world.

And these struggles won’t simmer down anytime soon. Political instability and tribal conflict seem to be spreading across Africa like cancer, generating fresh supplies of migrants, refugees and dead bodies on what seems like a monthly basis. The Darfur disaster, despite the presence of nearly 20,000 peacekeepers, has spilled into neighboring nations, aggravating existing troubles in Somalia. Over 200,000 Sudanese refugees have also fled into Chad and the Central African Republic; the resulting violence has opened the door for the European Union to start building a 3,700-member peacekeeping force in those two nations. Foreign peacekeepers also find themselves trying to keep a lid on political turmoil in Côte d’Ivoire, and on rising border tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Foreign deployments patrol disturbances in Western Sahara, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia. Sub-Saharan Africa hosts 10 foreign military bases and training missions, six of them belonging to France alone.

The calls for intervention in Kenya are the latest in an astonishing trend. After decades of independence following colonial rule, Africa is in danger of being recolonized.

Recolonized—really? The humanitarian duties being undertaken by today’s peacekeeping forces have an aura of benignity, even righteousness.

But history teaches a brutal lesson: Peoples weakened by division and infighting invite foreign conquest.

Look around. The same forces that fueled past imperialistic adventures are alive and well in human nature today. Chief among these is the lust for resources. And in our voracious, globalized modern world, this powerful motivator is at historically epic heights.

Africa holds an estimated 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves. It produces over 60 metal and mineral products. A number of the world’s most important metals and minerals—gold, diamonds, uranium, manganese, chromium, nickel, bauxite, cobalt, platinum—are produced in Africa. But the biggest prize: Crude oil is being discovered in massive amounts. The Corporate Council on Africa reports that Africa contains over 90 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, representing 9.1 percent of the world’s total reserves. Africa has greater oil production potential than Russia. To outsiders, it looks like a black gold mine.

You can be sure, this makes Africa a major strategic concern.

Clearly, outside nations—particularly China and those in Europe—are doing all they can to charm African states out of their wealth using purely economic incentives. Trade is flourishing, investment is building African infrastructure. Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Assistance, said in December, “Africa is no longer perceived as a burden but rather as an opportunity.”

That opportunity can be seized peacefully as long as those African states are stable and secure. But when chaos erupts such as that in Kenya, other nations see two things that compel them to intervene: loss of value in their investments, and an opportunity to assert control and stake a greater claim.

Europe in particular has a storied history of exploiting the African continent for its wealth. “Europeans overwhelmed [Africa] in the last quarter of the 19th century, looking for loot,” wrote Blaine Harden in Dispatches From a Fragile Continent. “Total conquest took all of about 25 years.” In colonial days, an “imperial contract” existed between Europe and Africa: Europe plundered Africa’s wealth, including raw materials and labor, in exchange for continental “civilization.” During World War ii, Hitler’s economy minister looked to revive and expand that contract, calling it “Eurafrique,” or Eur-Africa. Mussolini and France’s Vichy regime also used the term. It was buried in the 1970s. Memories of that unsavory past came to life just last year, however, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy revived the concept as part of his foreign-policy vision. South Africa’s Sunday Independent reported, “Sarkozy may have used the term Eurafrique out of ignorance of the past, but it represents a lingering state of mind that many hoped was gone forever” (Dec. 9, 2007). Hope as many might, the Eurafrique state of mind still does linger in European minds. And it will grow as the need for resources grows.

Looking at this present trend in light of history provides a much more sober view of just how we can expect it to unfold in the time ahead. But it is when compared with the perspective offered by biblical prophecy that it actually becomes frightening.

The most chilling prophecy to be fulfilled in the near future, as the Trumpet has repeatedly proven, is that of a final resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe. Detailed passages in the book of Revelation describe the nature of this mighty kingdom of the north. This German-led empire will become infamous for its voracious appetite for resources (Revelation 18:12-13). It is prophesied to corporately reinvade its old African colonial possessions, pillaging resources to feed the furnaces and drive the machinery that will turn out tools of war for a remilitarizing imperialist power. Shamefully, among those resources will be a slave market of unprecedented proportions.

Kenyans would do well to think on these prophecies. The misguided individuals using political pretexts to justify violent tribal feuding are, in fact, only speeding the day of their nation’s downfall at foreign hands.

Here history affords another lesson—one that should hit close to home for those in the West, particularly America, Britain and Israel.

In times past, God allowed the nations of Israel to endure forced slave labor when they turned their back on His protection. The captivities of Israel and of Judah are well documented in secular history, and their spiritual cause—disobedience to the Creator—is detailed in Scripture.

Right alongside those prophecies of Africa’s plunder are those of the modern descendants of Israel and Judah—America, Britain and the Jewish state of Israel—convulsing in social disorder not unlike that choking Kenya, and then, riven by division and infighting, falling prey to the same European empire. You can read about those prophecies in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, and in our article “The End of the Free World.”

The affluent, complacent West looks at Kenya and thinks, It will never happen here. Biblical prophecy shows that assumption is flat wrong.

Look at Kenya, and behold your future.

As we witness events moving toward the fulfillment of these prophecies, however, we should also recognize the fingerprints of the God who issued these prophecies for our benefit. As Jesus Christ said, “I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe.”