Queries on Tribes

Over the weekend I had an interesting discussion with my Dad regarding the achievements (or lack thereof) of the Kibaki administration. As the discussion inevitably turned to NARC-K and ODM, the temperature heated up and voices became shrill. It suddenly dawned upon me that almost all Kenyans on both sides of the political divide were motivated by something less than ideology, something less than the objective assessment of a government's or politician's merit. It is the big gorilla in the room no one wants to discuss. No, I am not referring to Fred Gumo, but to the tribe -supposedly the basic unit of the African polity.

The questions that bedevil me are these. What is a tribe? If the tribe is so central to our identity, why has the concept been so systematically demonized? Why is it absent in our current and proposed governing structures?

What is a tribe? According to Wikipedia, a tribe "consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states...The term is often loosely used to refer to any non-Western or indigenous society." This definition is remarkable because it doesn't tell us what a tribe is, but what it is not. It is not a state and it is not Western. Tribes lack the moral, cultural, administrative and material refinement associated with statehood. And the moniker is uniquely applied to non-Westerners. (This, strictly speaking, is not true. The "savage" hordes that ravaged the outer reaches of the Roman empire in Europe were grouped into tribes.) I think the notion the word is meant to portray is uncivilised. The penchant for equating civilisation with Westernisation then leads us to the absurd situation where the Irish, Scots, English and Welsh are not the tribes of Britain but the Ibos, Fulani and Hausa are tribes in Nigeria (nothing to do with population, by the way, since the Ibos easily outnumber the Welsh and Scots combined.) Europe has ethnicities, the rest have tribes. The difference is in the connotation. In the reality show "Survivor", participants are grouped into tribes because "ethnic groups" somehow does not quite convey the idea of uncivilization that the show thrives on.

Now, it is obvious that we are dealing with a loaded word here and need to be careful (I wouldn't wish to find myself in the position of arguing that a lack of civilisation is central to African identity!). Why is allegiance to one's tribe so demonised? Let me be the first to state that some of the most heinous crimes have been committed in the name of the tribe. Just look at Rwanda. However, many more massacres have been committed in the name of ethnicity, race, religion and state but these are not demonised to the same degree. Do the "tribal" aspirations of the Luos really differ from the "ethnic" aspirations of the Serbs, Albanians, Chechens, Scots, Irish or French? The latter's railings against "Anglo-Saxon" domination sound very like the rants we hear about Kikuyu domination in Kenya. Was the Holocaust (and the many pogroms that preceded it) really not a tribal genocide same as the wholesale killing of Tutsis in Rwanda or the ongoing "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur? Is it more "civilised" to pack human beings into cattle boxes and transport them to gas chambers where their deaths are meticulously recorded, rather than to pick up machetes and hack them at random?

In Kenya, our response to the political challenges posed by tribe has been wacha ukabila! We have been banging our heads against that particular brick wall for the last 40 years. (Today, our political parties are little more than vehicles for tribal ambitions and accommodations. In the 60s, KANU was a Kikuyu-Luo Affair and KADU a coalition of the smaller tribes. In the new millenium, we are still struggling with the consequences of the Kikuyu-Luo falling out, only we try disguise it in ideological terms. There was a brief rapproachment in 2002, but the rift opened up again.) Why are we afraid to accept the tribal basis of our politics? Why is it considered a liability? If democracy springs from the people, and the people are a tribal lot, then should that not be reflected and accommodated in our national institutions? Take the US example. In the drafting of their constitution, they acknowledged that the basic political unit was the state. Small states feared domination by big states. They did not resolve this by shouting wacha ustate! Instead they accommodated the reality of it in the institutions they created. Should we not be looking to accommodate the reality of the tribe in our constitutional arrangements?

Answers anyone?

The Devil at the UN

For all of you who missed it. All the ranting aside, Chavez does make a good point about the imperialism of the US and the neo-cons' propensity to see the extremist in all who disagree with their worldview. Kenyanentrepreneur says much the same thing though I would respectfully remind him that Chavez and his new pal Ahmadinejad are hardly paragons of virtue. And while the latter did win an election, it was a deeply flawed one with many candidates denied the opportunity to run by the ruling Mullahs. Iran imports up to 40% of its petroleum despite having the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world. Ahmadinejad's views on Israel are anachronistic and the last time he addressed the UN, he embarassed many Iranians by claiming afterwards that a divine halo had enveloped him during the course of his speech.

The Nutty Professor

Prof. Makau Mutua, writing in the Nation, once again demonstrates the folly of seeing a new constitution as a panacea for all that ails Kenya. He correctly characterises the current machinations for miimum reforms as "an ideologically empty battle for raw political power" and goes to great lengths to demonstrate why the proposed reforms would neither deliver a democratised state nor address the critical problems at the heart of our disfunctional democracy. His proposed magic pill? "Holistic and comprehensive constitutional reform" of the sort that we have been chasing for the last twenty years.

In arguing against the minimum changes, he mistakes constitutionalism for a constitution and assumes that our ethnic-based political system is a liability that can be solved through legislative means. He also leads us into a political and intellectual cul-de-sac by implying that the imperial presidency, which is the main obstacle to reform, can be done away with in one fell blow by the enactment of a new constitution.

According to Joel Ngugi, an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington, "a constitution does not mythically solve contested political problems. It provides a shared framework to rework, re-organise, re-funnel, re-think and re-frame these political problems. It is a product of political compromise." The tribal nature of our politics is not something that can be legislated into oblivion. It is a function of our diversity. While our political parties may be ideologically bereft, they do have real ethnic constituencies. The contest for political power is also a struggle by these constituencies for their rightful share of the national cake. Any good constitution would only provide a level playing field for that struggle not change the terms of it. In the light of this, any attempts to regulate the competition for power and make it a fair contest should be welcomed. While recognising that the IPPG compromise was instrumental in ejecting the KANU kleptocrats from State House, Prof. Mutua, by opposing electoral reform, sets the stage for the perpetuation of the equally kleptocratic Kibaki regime in power and further dilution of the prospect of real reform.

Secondly, Prof Mutua states that "the reason for Mr Kibaki’s failure to reform the state is that he inherited an imperial presidency" (a poor choice of words as one would think that an "imperial presidency" would afford, rather than deny, Kibaki an opportunity to change the system, if he so wished). The kind Professor does not, however, burden us with his views on how we would go about dismantling that institution before embarking on constitutional reform considering that the presidency would itself be the main target of those reforms. It is a classic catch 22: we have to remove the powers of the president, so we can have the necessary reforms to remove the powers of the president. I see things differently. The overaching presidency is the product of numerous constitutional amendments. Why not use the same process to cut it down? The sorry history of constitutional reform in Kenya has demonstrated that no incumbent will willingly cede the power of his office, literally at the stroke of a pen, by promulgating a new constitution. However, the same history shows that it is possible to extract a series of minimal compromises that when put together have the effect of instituting a new constitutional order. The ODM's (or LDP's or whatever-meaningless-acronym-they-chose-to-be-known-by's) clamour for minimum changes before the elections, while undoudtedly sef-serving, provides an opprtunity to do just that.

In Jesus' Name

Evangelical Christian fanatics (Savedies) are really starting to scare me. In this ABC News report (Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan), US kids are openly taught to worship before an image of the Great Leader, George Bush. The extreme right looks intent on breeding its own bunch of suicide-bombers and even seems to admire the teachings of the madrasas in Pakistan from which came the Taliban and Al Qaida. Pastor Becky Fisher, whose "Bible Camp" is featured here and who is actively promoting the "Jesus Camp" documentary, says she wants "to see [the kids] as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they do in Pakistan and Palestine."
These are the very "Christians" who, under the pretext of fighting terror, support Bush's attempt to legalize torture, his attempts to subvert the US constitution and set up an imperial messianic presidency. They sound much like the Muslim extremists they claim to oppose. Both groups seek to impose their religion through the tactics of terror, indoctrination and manipulation of the instruments of State.