We must Face Up to our Multi-ethnic Reality

At the dawn of independence, our political leaders told us that we needed to build a united “nation” – one in which we accepted each other as equals, regardless of factors such as race, creed and ethnicity.  However, the reality has been far from that ideal.  It is common knowledge that all the three regimes that have governed our motherland have engaged in open ethnic bias, while preaching an anti-tribalism message.  This has resulted in heightened inter-ethnic tensions in contrast to pre-colonial days, when our various communities engaged in some cattle raids and inter-ethnic skirmishes, but also in trade, technological exchanges and intermarriage.

What compounds our problem is that one of the easiest rallying points for politicians to marshal a following is the idea of ethnicity.  It is for this reason that they seek to be installed as “elders” of their communities.  From that vantage point, they can go to the negotiating table with other “elders” in the hope of clinching selfish deals.  Thus the very people who claim to be solving the problem of “tribalism” are the actual cause of it, engaging in what some social scientists have referred to as “politicized ethnicity”.  Yet common sense tells us that the Malaria parasite cannot itself be the cure for Malaria, and so our opportunist politicians cannot help forge real communication between our various ethnic groups.

Who can deny that lucrative parastatals and key ministries have almost always been headed by people from the ethnic group of the man in the “big house”?  Who can gainsay the fact that key positions in our security services have very frequently been held by people from the sitting presidents’ ethnic groups?  Who can disavow the fact that the allocation of our country’s resources has been skewed towards the regions from which the heads of state have hailed?  Yet the same appointing authorities and their associates trumpet how “de-ethnicised” they are!

After the 2007/2008 post-elections crisis, some politicians took this empty moralizing a notch higher by trumpeting the purported need for legislation to outlaw “tribalism”, and by overseeing the establishment of the "National Cohesion and Integration Commission". Such politicians claim that they are “nationalists”, that is, people who believe in working towards a de-ethnicised Kenya.  This pervasive hypocrisy has now resulted in unnecessary euphemisms such as references to “residents of central Kenya” instead of talking about “Kikuyus”, or “residents of Nyanza” instead of mentioning communities such as Kisiis, Kurias and Luos. This kind of euphemism is most painful when journalists report the inter-ethnic clashes that flare up sporadically in various parts of the country.

The term “nation-building” refers to the endeavour to forge a single “people” out of an ethnically plural society.  Yet we need to re-evaluate the rationale for such a venture.  Social theorists are agreed that among the key features of ethnicity are common history, material culture (tools, artwork etc.) and language.  These shared elements result in a feeling of community, even kinship, so that all those in the group see themselves as an “us”, as opposed to the “them” – those outside the group.  A successful process of nation building would therefore have to eliminate the “us-them” dichotomy.  Yet such elimination cannot be achieved by legislation, as laws cannot uproot the deep attachment that people have to their culture.

Think of how the criminalization of religion in Communist countries only resulted in its flourishing underground, while the “freedom of worship” in the West has not abated the march towards post-modern secularism.  This should tell us that legislating against “tribalism” will only cause the phenomenon to gain an unprecedented vitality in the underworld, and to erupt with vigour and venom at an opportune time.  To resume my medical metaphor, a drug wrongly administered can actually cause resistance in a pathogen instead of eliminating it, thus even encouraging it to reproduce faster.

In sharp contrast to the centuries’ old strong historical and cultural cords that bind members of an ethnic group together, the idea of Kenya is less than a hundred years old, having only been introduced by the British colonialists in 1920, when they renamed the then so-called East African Protectorate to Kenya.  Think of how difficult the quest for a Kenyan national dress has been: we all know what Maasai or Turkana or Giriama dress looks like, but there is no Kenyan dress to talk about – we can only try to design one now.  Consequently, we should be wary of any politician who tells us that he or she is first and foremost a Kenyan before being a Digo, or Kikuyu or Luo.  In fact it has now become abundantly clear that most, if not all, of the politicians who shout loudest against tribalism are the chief perpetrators of it.

It is therefore high time we boldly acknowledged that Kenya is not a nation; rather it is a multi-ethnic state.  Once we do this, we can undertake candid debate on how to manage this reality to the advantage of all involved.  It will then not be necessary to deny that Ford Kenya enjoys massive Bukusu following, or that the Orange Democratic Party has overwhelming Luo support, or that KANU has a vast Kalenjin grassroot base.  Instead, we shall put in place the legal framework for coalitions among the various parties, rather than camouflaging such alliances under single parties as happened with NARC in 2002, and with Jubilee and CORD in 2013.

Once we openly admit and accept the fact of our ethnic plurality, the ground will be ready for discussion on how the various communities can work together.  The 2002 elections in which Kibaki was more popular in Luo Nyanza than Orengo, and in which Raila was briefly a darling of many Kikuyus because of his support for Kibaki, would then be the rule rather than the exception.

We also urgently need to strengthen democracy within the ethnic groups, or else our acknowledgement of our ethnic diversity will merely be fertile ground for opportunists to present themselves as ethnic chiefs.  Thus the dizzying and almost unchallenged hegemony of the Odinga family in Luo Nyanza, the close to divine status of Moi among some sections of the Kalenjin umbrella of ethnic groups, and the breath-taking veneration of Kibaki in Nyeri must be replaced by vigorous internal debates to determine the political destinies of the various communities.  Once this is done, the communities can then be engaged in inter-ethnic negotiations with a view to identifying ways through which they can be of mutual benefit to one another.  If this process goes on long enough, ethnicity will become a peripheral issue in our collective psyche, as various ethnic groups gain a deep appreciation for one another and other concerns take centre stage.

Due to our politicians’ persistent but empty moralizing against “tribalism”, it is now widely believed that once ethnic sympathies are eliminated from our midst, all our political tensions will be buried in the sea of forgetfulness.  Those holding such a view will do well to look at Somalia, where for more than two decades Somalis have been maiming and killing fellow Somalis, despite belonging to one ethnic group.  For the fact of the matter is that it is part of human nature to cluster, if not as ethnic groups, then as clans or families or genders or members of a religious faith or of an economic class.  What we urgently need is a workable long-term formula of managing such clustering instead of denying it. We must begin to ask, without shame, camouflage or euphemism, how fairly the country's economic and political resources are being shared among its various ethnic groups. Let us stop living a lie.