David Ndii’s decision
to publicly renounce
Kikuyu ethnicity last year and adopt a “Jaluo” one may spark a long overdue
debate about the nature of ethnicity in Kenya and in Africa. For many people,
both on the continent and outside it, the idea of tribe - with its connotations
of strong, primitive, primordial ethnicity and ancient cultural traditions - is
an indispensable part of African identity. The makers of the blockbuster
superhero movie, Black Panther, who
imagined the fictional African state of Wakanda as the most technologically
advanced nation in the world and one that retained its essential character, still felt
constrained to organise that nation into tribes. Africans are first and
foremost seen as tribesmen or tribeswomen and tribe is taken for granted as the
best explanation for their actions. This idea is so deeply ingrained that few
ever bother to question it.
Yet question it we
should. For rather than something indelibly encoded into the African genetic
make-up and over which one exercises little choice, tribe turns out to be
largely an artificial construct. The fact is, there is a marked difference
between how ordinary Africans, including Kenyans, think of tribe and its
origins and what history and social science has to say about it.
To begin with, just
what is a tribe? Even this question turns out to be not as straightforward as
some would have us believe. “Tribe has no coherent meaning” wrote Dr.
Christopher Lowe of Boston University in his 1997 paper “Talking
about ‘Tribe’: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis”. “If by
tribe we mean a social group that shares a single territory, a single language,
a single political unit, a shared religious tradition, a similar economic
system, and common cultural practices, such a group is rarely found in the real
world,” he wrote.
What? But people do
identify as Kikuyus or Luos, no? And they have done this for ages, haven’t
they? Well, yes and no. People have always banded together in groups in search
of security. As they grew, such groups, initially defined by kinship relations,
developed common ways of responding to and relating with the world around them,
as well as systems to manage relations within the group. But since the world
kept changing, so did these groups. Some were subsumed into others, some got
separated and developed along different paths, others disappeared altogether. Customs
and languages changed. The idea that our current ethnic communities have
survived unchanged from ancient times is plainly false. As Prof. Scott
MacEachern of Bowdoin College in the US says,
“‘Tribal’ and/or ethnic identities have never been primordial and immutable, in
Africa or elsewhere.”
In fact, our current
ethnic formations - some of which did not even exist a century ago - and our
understanding of how they relate to each other, are the products of much more
recent events. “What
is a tribe?” asks Mahmood Mamdani, the Executive
Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research. “It is very largely a
creation of laws drawn up by a colonial state which imposes group identities on
individual subjects and thereby institutionalises group life… Above all, tribe
was a politically driven, totalising identity.”
“The politicisation of
ethnic identity began with the colonial experience,” says Prof. Kimani Njogu in
the recent Africa Uncensored documentary titled In Tribe We Trust. According to the book Ethnicity
and African Politics by Crawford Young, “although the ethnic
labels… have pre-colonial origins, they became comprehensive and rigidly ranked
categories only in the colonial period; they were heavily influenced by
imperial codifications and further transformed by politicised actions in the
last half-century.”
Clearly, pre-colonial peoples had their ideas as to who they were and how
they related to the world around them. But what we call tribes today bears little semblance to the ever-changing aboriginal
identities they fashioned and would probably be completely unrecognisable to
them. In any case, the idea that today’s ethnic communities necessarily grew
out of kinship relations is bogus.
In pre-colonial
societies, as Young explains, ethnicity was a fungible cultural artefact, one
that was not necessarily encoded into one’s genes, attached to particular
homelands or imbued with ideas of political sovereignty. Individuals and even
entire societies could navigate in and out of them. In fact, even the ideas of kinship
and shared ancestry were “notoriously malleable to serve contemporary social or
ideological purposes. But once rooted in the social consciousness, mythology
convincingly impersonates reality.” For example, a study
by Timothy Parsons of Washington University details how the colonial government
once urged Meru elders to accept anyone willing to bow to their authority as Meru.
He further states that “Kikuyu” was more an expression of agricultural
expertise than a coherent or bounded ethnic group.
However, for a colonial
administration that required order and control in order to facilitate its
extractive aim, such inexactitude was unacceptable. Confronted with the reality
of the diversity on the African continent, the European colonisers tried to hammer
it into compliance with their preconceived ideas. Much of this was accomplished
using administrative measures and backed up by brute force. Young writes: “The
task of the colonial state was to discover, codify, and map an ethnic geography
for their newly conquered domains, according to the premise that the continent
was inhabited by ‘tribal man.’ This ethnic template, as imagined by the coloniser,
became the basis for administrative organisation.” Parsons adds that “faced
with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conquered Kenya, colonial
officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative
units.”
Thus colonialism
imposed its own version of order, superimposed its idea of tribes bounded
within district boundaries on this ethnic patchwork, and even created an
entirely new “traditional” administrative structure in the form of tribal chiefs who were
actually state employees. Young writes of “the illusion that colonial ethnic
mappings were historically authentic”. In this way, the state created the tribe
which, in turn, became, as Parsons states, “the basic unit of government,
education, labour, law, and most importantly land tenure.”
The late Prof Terence
Ranger, in his famous 1983 essay on The
Invention Of Tradition in Colonial Africa, shows how invented
traditions, both European and African, were a crucial plank in allowing colonial
settlers and administrators to “define themselves as natural and undisputed
masters of vast numbers of Africans.” Which meant reinventing colonials as
feudalistic patriarchs and the African as the tribal savage. Though many “found
themselves engaged in tasks which by definition would have been menial in
Britain and which only the glamour of empire building made acceptable” they
were still proud to belong to “an aristocracy of colour”. Echoes of this remain
today in the deference with which European “expatriates” are treated.
Ranger also notes that “since
so few connections could be made between British and African political, social
and legal systems, British administrators set about inventing African
traditions for Africans… transforming flexible custom into hard prescription.”
So successful was this effort that “many African scholars as well as many
European Africanists have found it difficult to free themselves from the false
models of colonial codified African ‘tradition’.” As he would more
recently summarize, the colonial period was marked “by systematic
inventions of African traditions - ethnicity, customary law, ‘traditional’
religion. Before colonialism Africa was characterised by pluralism,
flexibility, multiple identity; after it African identities of ‘tribe’, gender
and generation were all bounded by the rigidities of invented tradition.”
However, it is
important to note that while tribe and tradition were built into the very
foundation of the colonial state, the people were not just passive victims. Just
as they had been doing for eons, they both resisted and reacted to the
impositions, inventing and discarding identities and traditions of their own. At
the outset of the colonialism, some identities, like Kikuyu, were already in
the process of being created though, as described by Prof
Bruce Berman, were not yet stable nor traditional; they hardened in response to
the colonial state. Later, similar innovations like Gusii, Luhya, Kalenjin and
Mijikenda appeared in the years between the two World Wars to essentially beef
up numbers for the negotiation of status within the colonial state. What John
Iliffe said of our neighbours to the south in his book, A
Modern History of Tanganyika, was true in
Kenya: "The British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to tribes;
Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial framework."
Such ethnic and cultural refashioning continues to this day.
The important takeaway
is that rather than ancient “nations”, today’s ethnicities are a creation of the
colonial era - “state-sponsored tribal ethnographies and romantic essentialised
notions of tribal culture”, as Parsons describes them. Writing a decade ago as Kenya threatened to descend
into ethnic carnage, American historian Caroline Elkins, author of Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, noted that “Britain's
famous imperial policy of ‘divide and rule’, playing one side off another, …
often turned fluid groups of individuals into immutable ethnic units, much like
Kenya's Luo and Kikuyu today. In many former colonies, the British picked favourites
from among these newly solidified ethnic groups and left others out in the
cold. We are often told that age-old tribal hatreds drive today's conflicts in
Africa. In fact, both ethnic conflict and its attendant grievances are colonial
phenomena.”
In addition to creating
and freezing tribal identities, the colonial state discouraged and outrightly
forbade political organisation across the district lines they had drawn up.
This meant that tribes were not just administrative and geographical entities;
they were also set up as units for political mobilisation. Tribes were, therefore,
state-mandated political identities that substituted for authentic cultural
expression. “The structure of tribal administration enabled the ruling British
elite to deny any representative character to the troublesome urban
nationalist, while claiming for itself just that,” wrote Talal Asad,
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York in his essay “Political
Inequality in the Kababish Tribe.” “Thus ‘the tribe’ and the
‘tribal system’ from being a means of efficient administration became the
justification for perpetuating colonial domination.”
During the bulk of the
colonial era, competition for state power was conducted along racial lines (race
being a
similarly artificial construct) while resistance to it was channeled
along the tribe. The Legislative
Council, for example, had a racial make-up, with representatives of Europeans,
Arabs, Indians and eventually Africans. However, as Barasa Nyukuri of the
University of Nairobi observes,
“The early political parties in Kenya that championed the nationalist struggle
against colonial establishments were basically `distinct ethnic unions'.” As independence approached, feuds over the
state that the British would leave behind were transferred to the tribal arena.
This understanding
provides a different perspective to the essentialist arguments offered by David
Ndii about Kenya being
a marriage of tribes. The reverse is actually
true. The reality is that Kenya created tribes and then based its governance
arrangements around them. And this is the primary reason why tribalism continues
to infect our politics – as the Kenyan investigative journalist John Allan Namu
declared, “Kenyan politics, by design, was always meant to be tribal.”
Sadly, despite their
relatively recent colonial origins, tribal identities have proven to be all too
enduring and ingrained. In the post-independence era, the ruling elites who inherited
the colonial state from the British largely maintained its extractive nature
and divide-and-rule character, even further entrenching ethnicity while paying
lip service to the need to eradicate tribalism. As noted by Professor Daniel
Branch in his book Kenya: Between Hope
and Despair, “elites have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically
in a manner informed first and foremost by ethnicity, in order to crush demands
for the redistribution of scarce resources.”
The consequences have
been predictable. Rather than tools for common advancement, the state and the
resources it controls have become prizes in a bitter, no-holds-barred, ethnic contest
for supremacy. The “totalising identity” of tribe has meant that
Kenyans are unable to conceive of themselves otherwise, and thus are unable to imagine
a different basis for political engagement. The zero-sum nature of the
competition for power further reinforces and hardens tribal affiliations,
engendering a with-us-or-against-us mentality with those who resist it branded as
“ethnic traitors”. This all creates a vicious spiral at the bottom of which lie
brutal conflagrations, death and displacement. Floating above the melee, just
as the British did, is the political class that incites and is then able to continue
its thieving ways with little fear of retribution.
Basing a state on the
idea of tribe has also led to the perpetuation of regional inequalities as
communities “not in government” are either neglected or, worse, treated as
enemies of the state. It also drives corruption as public office is seen as an opportunity
for tribal “eating”. Which is why the ethnic affiliation of the head of a
public institution is always a good indicator of the ethnic composition of its
employees. It is also the reason Members of Parliament feel constrained to
defend public officials who suffer disciplinary action, as was the case recently
when Lily Koros, the CEO of the Kenyatta National Hospital, was sent
on compulsory leave after doctors at the hospital performed a brain
surgery on the wrong patient. As Jerotich Seii observed on
Twitter, “If Lily Koros was, say, Mjikenda, not a peep would have
been heard from these Kalenjin MPs. Ok, perhaps from Mjikenda MPs. And therein
lies the problem. We defend tribe and not competence.”
The tribalisation of
governance also fosters development strategies based on false ideas of ethnic
characteristics, such as the one that some groups are not as suited for
modernisation as others. Further, as Mamdani explains, the idea of unchanging tribes
leads to the deification of fake, colonially-articulated, “traditional” culture
and values, as well as the externalisation of social progress as “Western”. That
has real consequences for social policy, for example on
gay rights.
It will be impossible
to eradicate tribalism without undoing the colonial state on which our current
ideas about ethnicity are founded and whose logic of extraction sustains them.
As John
Lonsdale puts it, “There are, then, two very
different dynamics currently at work in Kenya: internal ethnic dissidence and
external tribal rivalry. Neither can be disarmed without rewriting the rules of
political competition for the power of a rather different (‘post-post-colonial’)
state.” Tribes today exist primarily as vehicles for capturing the state rather
than as celebrations of diversity – which they, in fact, try to rub out. They
exist to safeguard elite extraction and to prevent us from imagining different
ways of being.
Kenyans today have
perfected the curious art of decrying tribalism even while accepting the
validity of tribe. Following the colonial template, the 2010 constitution institutionalizes
ethnic formulations as the basic unit of government via the creation of counties based on colonial
administrative districts and the safeguarding of
“ethnic diversity” in public
jobs. Today’s social justice activists railing against
“uthamaki”
– the skewing of state appointments towards
particular groups – and demanding "regional balance" seem incapable
of comprehending that the construction of the state around the idea of tribe is
itself the problem. In a recent
article, for example, Boniface Mwangi seems unaware of the irony of
establishing his Kikuyu bona fides - “I am as Gikuyu as Gikuyus come”- before
launching into a screed against Kikuyu tribalism.
Recognising that the
tribe was a colonial-era invention is empowering because it means it can be
disinvented or reimagined; tribe is not destiny. Many look to Tanzania as an
example of how the adverse
effects of tribe can be ameliorated through
public policy. Young also cites Kenya as an example where this has been
attempted via constitutional design through devolution, the proscription of
ethnically-based political parties and the requirement for presidential
candidates to garner 25 per cent of the votes in a majority of the counties.
However, this retains – rather than challenges – the idea of tribe and only
seeks to manage relations between tribes, which means the potential for harmful
political mobilisation of tribal affiliation remains. As Young acknowledges,
“while constitutional engineering is of substantial value, it cannot alone
respond to the challenge of accommodating cultural diversity”.
The only way to
completely eliminate real and potential inter-tribal tensions is to eliminate
tribes. And the only way to do that is to eliminate the colonial state that
created and nourished them, and to construct a different state and identities,
even a national identity, on different foundations in its place. The problem is
less the politicisation of ethnicity and more the ethnicisation of politics – the
assumption that ethnicity is destiny without interrogating how ethnicity was
and still is manufactured.
Kenyan social and
political scientists can and should lead this effort. For too long we have left
it to the politicians who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. Many
Kenyans will understandably be scared of the idea of letting go of the ethnic
brands that have defined them their whole lives, regardless of how hollow or
counterproductive that branding may actually be. Providing a language to deconstruct
the state and the tribe, as well as developing a basket of alternative, homegrown
and much more authentic and beneficial political identities, are the overriding
challenges of our time.
There is no point in
pretending that this is going to be either easy or straightforward. Or that
such a project would not itself be vulnerable to capture by a ravenous and
oppressive elite seeking to legitimise its rule, as has happened in Rwanda. But
we can begin a national conversation about who we really are as people and how
we build a Kenya for Kenyans and an Africa for Africans. That itself means
beginning to see ourselves not as the “tribes” of Western imagination strait-jacketed
by concocted traditions, but as free and thinking human beings with varied and ever-changing
ways of being, and who are capable of imagining and bringing to life new worlds
of our own.
A version of this article was first published in The Elephant.