Harambee
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harambee is Kenyan tradition of community self-help events, eg. fundraising or community development activities. Harambee is also the official motto of Kenya and appears on its coat of arms.
Harambee literally means "pulling together" in Swahili, and may range from informal affairs lasting a few hours in which invitations are spread by word of mouth, to formal, multi-day events advertised in newspapers. These events have long been important in parts of East Africa as ways to build and maintain communities.
Following Kenya's independence in 1963, the first Prime Minister and later first President of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta adopted "Harambee" as a concept of pulling the country together to build a new nation. He encouraged communities to work together to raise funds for all sorts of local projects, pledging that the government would provide their startup costs. Under this system, wealthy individuals wishing to get into politics could donate large amounts of money to local harambee drives, thereby gaining legitimacy; however, such practices were never institutionalised during Kenyatta's presidency.
Kenyatta's successor, Daniel Arap Moi, realised that the harambee system could be used to enhance his own political position. He took large amounts of money out of the state accounts and donated it to harambee drives as an individual; unsurprisingly, there was always a huge upsurge in such activity prior to an election. He ensured that his political supporters had plenty of resources to hand out to harambee drives in their own constituencies during election campaigns; over time, such behaviour became the norm, and voters in many constituencies could be expected to elect the candidate who had donated the most money. By taking advantage of state resources and the harambee tradition in this way, Moi and his supporters were able to build strong ties with constituencies. This was one of the factors which contributed to Moi's election win of 1991.[citation needed]
