On March 4, Uhuru Kenyatta won the presidential election in Kenya with 50.07 percent of the vote. Since 2010, Kenyatta has been subject to accusations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in 2007 post-election violence, on account of his party not winning the election. The death toll reached around 1,300 and up to 600,000 people were displaced, according to CBS News.

Contention has risen on the international stage since Kenyatta, who has a pending trial date set for July, was recently elected president. International opinion has suggested this position should be reconsidered and has projected Kenyatta’s role in Kenyan politics as prominently negative.

Suffolk has not been immune to this conflict of international rhetoric surrounding Kenya. One student, Catherine Kinyua of Nairobi, Kenya, commented on the role of nationalism and biased international discussion since the election of President-Elect Kenyatta.

“My family isn’t sure how it will go,” Kinyua said, “I doubt that he will step down. [He] would’ve done it before elections; [this is the] first time with a president going through this.” Regardless, Kinyua stressed that all people of Kenya “knew what was going on during [the] election.” In the case of the election, Kenyatta’s prevalence of power and support was because “he comes from a well-known family. [He was elected] for the good he has done for the country,” as Kinyua stated.

Kenyatta comes from a family in which his father was Kenya’s first president and prime minister, and has been deemed the founding father of Kenya. His family has a strong rapport and has played a pivotal role in politics in the latter half of the 21st century. A great deal of strife resonant in this year’s elections and public opinion within Kenya was because of tribal disputes and affiliations.

In an article written in Foreign Policy Magazine, the situation in Kenya was paralleled to that of post-Nazi Austria. The moral of the argument, put simply, was that Austrians were inclined to elect politicians with proven Nazi affiliations and distinct histories of abhorrent practices during the war. Nevertheless, because they represented unity, forgetting the past was justifiable for Austrians at the time, specifically under Kurt Waldheim who was elected secretary general of the United Nations and ran for the presidency in Austria. This sentiment was a product of “diplomatic isolation,” helping to ignore