Philip Ochieng
26 May 2008
opinion
Nairobi — ONE WORD SEEMS TO drive our national fate: Tribalism. If the December elections were hijacked, we all blamed it confidently on tribalism. In any case, its most spectacular consequence - the violence that rocked the entire country - seemed to pit certain tribes against others.
Even now that the political belligerents appear to have found a common denominator, we tend to say that the coalition government is a compromise of tribes. And Kenya is not alone. All formerly colonised peoples have the habit of using that word most glibly against one another.
But how many Kenyans and other African and Third World peoples really know what the epithet "tribalist" - by which they denigrate themselves so freely and so frivolously every day - really means? What, in the first place, is a tribe? Let us discuss at least the two definitions that I am aware of.
Originally, a tribe had nothing to do with ethnicity. A tribe was simply one of a number of units into which a sprawling empire was divided to facilitate administration. Ancient Rome was a good example. Indeed, it is to Latin that English owes the word "tribe".
In classical antiquity, today's Kenya - if thought of as an "empire" - would have been divided into eight administrative "tribes" called Central, Coast, Eastern, Nairobi, North Eastern, Nyanza, Rift Valley and Western. Tanzania's "tribes" would have included Kilimanjaro, Mara, Morogoro and Singida.
The second - and much better known - definition is much more recent. But it is terribly tendentious. For it is but a prejudice of the Western intelligentsia, and it dates only from mercantile times 500 years ago, when Western Europe began rising to the position of world hegemony.
According to it, a tribe is a group of individuals with a common blood heritage eking out a living at a very low level of socio-economic formation. A tribe, in short, is an ethno-linguistic community living in very "primitive" conditions.
In line with this second definition, we are told, tribes are extant only in the Third World, especially Africa. Accordingly, Tamil, Khmer, Inuit, Maori, Khosa, Ashanti, Acholi and Kisii are "tribesmen" and what they do among themselves or to their neighbours is what is "tribalism".
Yet, according to Western European and North American thinking, similar or often even lower socio-economic formations - such as Andalusian, Basque, Bosnian, Chechen, Flemish, Irish, Kosovar, Lapp, Sudeten and Welsh - are not tribes but "nationalities" or even "nations."
Whenever these demand anything for themselves or against each other - as in erstwhile Yugoslavia - it is not tribalism but "nationalism"! Critics condemn this as Eurocentrism. But racism is a more accurate term for the attitude that all human beings - except Europeans - live in tribal communities.
The upshot, according to this teaching, is that civilisation and savagery are genetic, not merely cultural, categories. That is why Mahmoud Mamdani, the celebrated Ugandan professor of political science, always uses the term "nationality" to refer to all the African groups that we call "tribes."
IN LINE WITH HIS FIERCE criticism of modern imperialism, Kenya's Taita, Maasai and Borana, say, are not "tribes" but nationalities. Other critics of this "developed-world conceit" - including Kenya's own Ngugi wa Thiong'o - go so far as to refer to those groups as nations.
In his non-fiction, Ngugi has no doubt in his mind that the Somali, Kamba, Luhya, Kikuyu, Luo and comparable communities in other African and Third World countries are nothing less than nations. How can I disagree?
If the Serbs and Croats are nationalities or nations - and not mere tribes - how can the Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu, Ganda and Kongo be called tribes? I must point out, however, that it causes much confusion whenever the same objector uses the word "nation" to refer also to a larger entity.
How can the Kikuyu and the Luo be "nations" when Kenya is also a "nation"? How can India be a nation when, within it, there exist such "nations" as the Bengali and the Bihari? But this problem plagues even Europe. The English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh nations compose something called the British "nation."
But among the central ideas about this definition is that a tribe is a social grouping that claims a primordial - often eponymous - ancestor, occupies a defined territorial continuum, speaks a peculiar language and practises a unique culture.
To the Western mind, the Kikuyu are a "tribe" of this kind. For Gikuyu is their (eponymous) father and they speak a definite "Bantu" language, have a set way of doing things and live in the territory that stretches from Mount Kenya to the Ngong Hills.
The Kenyan Luo are another "tribe." Their original core was led into what is now Kenya by an individual called Owiny. For that reason, Uganda's Luo communities - especially the Jopadhola (descendants of Owiny's brother Adhola) - erroneously refer to all of Kenya's Luo as Jokowiny (Owiny's children).
It is, nevertheless, useful to make this distinction because the term "Luo" (or "Lwo") is much more inclusive. It is claimed also by groups like the Lang'i, Acholi and Karamojong of eastern and northern Uganda, the Alur of northeastern Congo and the Nuer, Dinka and Shilluk of Southern Sudan.
Then, too, the Luo of Kenya (and Tanzania's Mara Region, to which they migrated only in colonial times) speak a certain Nilo-Saharan language, practise a certain culture and live in the territory around Lake Victoria's intrusive Nyanza Gulf.
But let us be careful about this Euro-colonial arrogance. Throughout the 20th century, objective anthropologists warned that ethnicity is not really a blood concept. They continue to teach that culture and language are the only reliable definition of an ethnic group.
Though basically Hamito-Negro, by the time they disappeared into history, the inimitable Copts of Egypt (the pyramid builders) carried much Semitic (Hyksos) and Aryan (Persian, Hellenic and Roman) blood in their vena cava. This means that a tribe can be a mixture even of races.
The Khoikhoi "tribe" of South Africa (whom the Anglo-Dutch knew pejoratively as "Hottentots") are classified with the "Khoisan-Bushmanoids" - these including Tanzania's Hadzabe, Namibia's !Kung and the Pygmies of the Congo silva.
But in Khoikhoi veins flows a great deal of Mongoloid (Indonesian-Malagasy) blood. That is why Khoikhoi skins tend towards what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called "gash gold vermilion."
LIKEWISE, THE MAGHREB Arabs have swallowed the blood not only of the original Libyans - a Negroid people - but also of the Caucasian Vandals who occupied North Africa for many centuries after the Gothic barbarians had destroyed the Roman empire in the middle of the first millennium AD.
In Ancient Iraq, Georges Roux warns that the Semites can no longer be defined by blood, but only by language. Linguistic syncretism is what enables New-Age commentators like Andrew Phillips and Zecharia Sitchin to allege that the ancient Canaanites (Phoenicians) were Semitic.
But, as Robert Graves indicates in The Greek Myths, the Canaanites came from Uganda and were, by original blood, Hamito-Negro. The best that can be said is that both the Hamites and the Semites originated in the area between Lake Victoria and the Horn of Africa, which is why the two groups of languages are so similar.
Nevertheless, Roux's warning is in one sense pertinent. Until very recently, all human groups perpetually moved back and forth over the face of the planet. In this way, they "donated" blood and "exchanged" culture and language everywhere.
In short, a tribe is always a complex "bloody" mixture. An entity like Luhya or Luo or Kikuyu is so heterogeneous in the veins that its claim to a common ancestor must be dismissed at once as an empty myth.
Mumbi and Gikuyu seem to be but an example of the creator-Goddess and her serpentine demiurge common to the creation myths of all ancient ethnic communities. This seems obvious. The name Mumbi is etymologically related to the Kiswahili verb kuumba ("to mould", "to shape", "to create").
Mumbi belongs to the same mythological bracket as the Akan Ngame, the Kalenjin Asiis, the Cushitic Assit or Ast, the Canaanite Astarte or Asherah, the Israelite Ashtoreth or Esther, the Babylonian Ishtar, the Atlantic Oestre and the Vedic Ishwa or Usha - the creator Goddess whose name the Hellenes distorted as Isis and who was known to the Nilo-Pelasgic Greeks as Eurynome ("she whose jurisdiction is worldwide").
IT IS ALMOST A CERTAINTY that Mumbi and Gikuyu were not real individuals but represented merely the farthest back that tradition or memory could trace the tribe's ancestry. Moreover, traditions of this kind are usually blind to the numerous adventitious roots that may have joined the taproot during a tribe's long journey into history.
Indeed, quite often, one of these tributary lines is what may eventually come to dominate the character of a tribal community. A good example is Israel. It came to be dominated by Judah (the "tribe" which later came to be known as "Jews").
But, in his many books on this subject, Laurence Gardner demonstrates - by means of clear genealogical graphs - that Judah had strong blood lacings from Amalek, Ammon, Copt, Cush, Edom, Hiv, Midian, Moab, Philistine and Troy.
This is what reduces to absurdity the fulminations by many Jewish priests against Israelite men taking wives from other ethnic situations. All of Israel-Judah's most revered patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon - are a "bloody" hodgepodge.
Thus, in any mythic tradition, the alleged founder of the original line may retain his paramount place as the father of the entire tribe, even though, by blood and other factors, the tribe may, by the material time, be far removed from this original patriarch.
For instance, Jewry's entire royal and priestly aristocracy was always Levite, natives of the Nilotic island of Malleui (now Mallawi) - that is to say, the island of Leui or Liwy or Lawi, the name which the Hellenic Greeks distorted as Levi.
Malleui was the base a magico-sacerdotal group affiliated to the Pharaoh Akhenaten who, under the pseudonym of "Moses", freed the Israelites, gave them his religion and led them in the trek called Exodus. That is why the leaders of the Exodus - including Miriam and Aaron - were called Levites.
By a certain time, a tribe's blood composition is so mixed that Desmond Morris (in The Human Zoo) calls it a "super-tribe." Despite, their blood heterogeneity, Jokowiny speak a more or less homogeneous language all the way from Ugenya to beyond the Tanzanian border and the Kikuyu all the way from Nanyuki to Kerarapon.
Culturo-linguistically, these two are more or less homogeneous super-tribes. But, by blood, they are bewilderingly complex concoctions. In other super-tribes, however, the melting in a pot began much more recently. So the culturo-linguistic syncretism is not yet so smooth.
If we call the Kalenjin a "tribe", what should we call the Keiyo, Kipsigis, Marakwet, Nandi, Pokot, Tugen and many others, all of whom are now subsumed under the portmanteau term "Kalenjin"?
Similarly, although the Maragoli, Bukusu and Samia-Manyala may be consanguine - which is why they now collectively call themselves Abaluhya - their languages are almost mutually unintelligible. If a Samia marries a Maragoli, they are usually forced to adopt Kiswahili or English as the household language.
Moreover, the Ababukusu have imbibed a great deal of Kalenjin blood and culture, and the Samia, Manyala, Kisa, Marach and Banyore are each almost 50 per cent Luo both by blood and by culture and language. So why should they necessarily pass as Luhya (and Bantu) and not as Luo (and Nilo-Saharan) or vice versa?
It is, indeed, doubtful whether the Abaluhya and the Kalenjin knew themselves by those terms before the advent of British colonialism. It appears that these terms were imposed on those clusters only in late colonial times - and by outsiders.
One tradition has it that the term "Kalenjin" was coined by the (colonial) Kenya Broadcasting Service as recently as the 1940s to refer to a cluster of distinct peoples each known as a "tribe" up to that time. It is probable that the term "Abaluhya" has the same history.
To reiterate, before the 1940s, the colonial regime knew as separate tribes the various groups that respectively compose the Kalenjin and the Abaluhya. As a boy, I knew of the Nandi, Marakwet, Lumbwa (now Kipsigis), Kamasia (now Tugen), Elgeyo (now Keiyo), Suk (now Pokot), etc, as discrete tribes. I never heard of any tribe called Kalenjin.
Take also Jokowiny (the Luo of Kenya and Tanzania). Like the Kalenjin and Maasai, they are a member of the culturo-linguistic super-group that the great Joseph Greenberg called "Nilotic" or "Nilo-Saharan."
This was the same American linguistic anthropologist who created such other African culturo-linguistic categories as "Niger-Congo" (or "Bantu"), "Khoisan" (or "Bushmanoid") and "Hamito-Semitic"(known also by the now thoroughly impugned term "Afro-Asiatic").
At the moment, the Nilo-Saharans stretch from northwestern Tanzania to Darfur and Chad, taking in lacustrine Kenya, northeastern Uganda, eastern Congo, Southern Sudan, western Ethiopia and Eritrea, the eastern parts of the Central African Republic, northern Cameroon, northeastern Nigeria and southeastern Chad.
Although I now pass as a Luo, my paternal clan - Rusinga's Waware - as well as Otieno Kajwang's Waondo and Peter Nyakiamo's Kaksingri originated from Uganda's Buganda and Busoga, the Waware fleeing by boat into what is now Kenya to escape a revolt against Kabaka Junju. In Kenya, they were joined by other wayward Bantu groups to become the Abasuba of today.
The Baganda, my paternal ancestors, belong to the great Bantu or Niger-Congo culturo-linguistic cluster. The Abasuba moved into South Nyanza just as the Luo were moving from northeastern Uganda into what was to become Central Nyanza.
In her book The Peopling of South Nyanza, Prof Theodora Olunga Ayot describes how they, too, eventually crossed the Gulf and poured into what used to be called South Nyanza. But the consequent conflation of blood, language, culture, economy and governance has always been Luo (Nilo-Saharan) in character.
Likewise, in the veins and arteries of the Kikuyu runs blood from the Ndia, Maasai, Samburu, Laikipiak, Ndorobo and others whom the Kikuyu themselves admit to be "foreigners" (Athi, singular: Mwathi).
As we know from Prof Godfrey Muriuki's book A History of the Kikuyu, almost all of these intruders into Kikuyu blood vessels were originally Nilo-Saharan. By blood, therefore, there is no such thing as Kikuyu.
The Meru of Kenya and the Chagga of Tanzania also nowadays pass as "tribes" of this kind, although they do not have even a common language and admit that they are composed of "bloody" and cultural elements that may originally have been as far from each other as Gujarati is from Irish.
In short, then, as a blood concept, ethnicity is a myth. What passes as a tribe is just a group of individuals whom happenstance long ago threw into a territorial melting pot so that today they speak the same language, practise the same culture and claim the same mythic progenitor.
As we have mentioned, we owe the word "tribe" to the ancient Romans. It comes from the Latin word tribus (plural: tribi), which originally referred to one of the political entities into which the Italic peoples were divided as satellites of Latium (today's Lazio), the area across the River Tiber in which Rome was built and whose people, culture and language were called Latin.
As the empire expanded, the term tribus came to be applied also to the non-Italic peoples of Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor (what is now Turkey) and southwestern Asia. Originally, then, a tribe had nothing to do with the blood, culture and language of a community. Subservience to a common centre was the essence of it.
Thus, although all the Italic peoples could claim a common ancestor, spoke more or less the same language and worshipped the same pagan god Sol Invictus, they, nevertheless, belonged to different administrative entities called tribi.
But by far the most celebrated tribes of this kind were the biblical Israelites. In the beginning they are depicted as "12 sons" of a single patriarch called Jacob (later nicknamed Israel). We are told that they enter Egypt as a mere family of 70 speaking the same language and bowing to the same Canaanite pantheon led by the god El Shaddai.
But, after 430 years of slave labour in Egypt, the 12 sons re-enter Canaan as 12 "tribes," even though they still speak a common language and still worship El Shaddai - now in the guise of the Egyptian Aten, who will soon merge with the Canaanite Baal and the Babylonian Marduk to produce a peculiar deity known as Yahweh (Jehovah).
They are now tribes because - although they still belong to the same bloodline of Jacob-Israel - they have become too many to be ruled as a single unit, so that, on arrival in Canaan, they have to settle as autonomous political parishes each under an administrator called "judge".
These "tribes" will be ruled separately - engaged in endless internecine inter-tribal squabbling and warfare - until centuries later when a super-judge called Samuel, claiming authority from the god, will unite them under an earthly king called Saul, completely subservient to the super-judge.
THE EMERGING EVIDENCE, however, is that, although Rome was what would later supply the term "tribe," both it and Israel borrowed their "tribalism" (in its politico-administrative sense) from the Cushites and Copts of the Nile valley.
Long before the Exodus (13th century BC) and the rise of Rome (9th century BC), Pharaonic Egypt was already divided into 12 administrative units, each with a governor. Beginning with the inimitable Eighteenth Dynasty, Nilotic Egyptian suzerainty sprawled all the way from the Kagera (in Rwanda) to the Indus, the Euphrates, the Danube, the Rhine, the Severn and the Shannon.
Thus Rome's "tribal" system, we now know, was Nilotic in origin and character. As Egypt's slaves, the Israelites, too, imbibed every Nilotic culturo-religious custom, including the Aten god whom they later remoulded into Yahweh and - more relevantly - the politico-administrative system that produced the mythical tradition of the "12 tribes of Israel."
For the tribes of Israel are not a historical reality. Laurence Gardner (in Genesis of the Grail Kings) and Ahmed Osman (in Out of Egypt) show that, as a "son" of Jacob, Joseph was pure fiction, invented so that the attributes of another Joseph - the purely Egyptian Joseph the vizier - could be transferred to him so as to promote the idea of Israel's "divine history."
It is now well known that the Soferim, the Jewish scribes who produced the Five Books of Moses, wrote from a protracted oral tradition only in the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC, a whole thousand years after the events they purport to be describing so knowledgeably.
This was the literary landscape that produced the myth of "12 sons" of Jacob-Israel, the activity that retroactively attributed the siring of the "sons" to Jacob-Israel and of their settlement Canaan as "tribes" to a certain Joshua.
Among the Nilotes, 12 - like 7 and 50 - was a profoundly mystical figure. The Nilotes had for a long time been enthralled by the astronomical phenomenon that astronomers nowadays call precessional houses of the Zodiac. Among them, the "houses" were known alternatively as "sons" and "tribes."
This was what informed Egypt's division into 12 administrative "houses" or "sons" or "tribes." This "figurative" mysticism was deeply etched in the minds of the Israelites as they laboured on the Delta - just as a Scandinavian-looking Euro-Christian Jesus would entrench himself permanently in our tribal minds as we slaved away for the British.
The Nilotic system of 12 political "tribes" was what the Babylonian Soferim transformed mythographically into "12 sons" and then into "12 tribes" of Israel.
The stories that Jacob had begat "12 sons" as he laboured for Laban in Harran and then led these sons to settle in Canaan and, much later, that Joshua led "12 tribes" to settle in the same Canaan after labouring for pharaoh - these are retroactive attributions of a myth created by the Soferim in Babylon many centuries after the alleged events.
But here is the point. In Egypt - as well as in Rome and in Canaan - each lower administrative unit was obliged by its subservience to pay a regular tax to the common centre. In Rome, since the lower administrative unit was called a tribus ("tribe"), so the levy came to be called a tribute and the payer a tributary.
A tribute is nowadays defined as a gift or statement made in acknowledgement, gratitude or admiration. But, more literally, a tribute is a payment by one ruler or state to another, usually as an acknowledgement of submission or defeat in war, a kind of reparation, whether by treaty or by force.
It was exactly like a small river forced by topological circumstances beyond its powers to empty its water into a larger river, thus being condemned to perpetual "water poverty" - which is why such small rivers have come to be known metaphorically as tributaries ("tribal rivers").
In classical antiquity - all the way from the Shannon to the Ganges - the Romans were probably the harshest imperialist power in exacting tributes from tributary (or tribal) peoples. The Christian New Testament tells of some very ruthless Roman "publicans" and other tax collectors throughout Judaea and Galilee.
This subservient tax-payment, then, was the essence of it when, much more recently, Britain herded all of us under a single political integument called colony and then divided us into administrative ethnic districts called tribes, peoples good only to toil for the conqueror so as to earn a pittance with which to pay a heavy tribute called poll tax.
This was the beginning of the "tribulations" that have beset Kenyans ever since then. The word tribulation comes from the Latin tribulatio (suffering), tribulare (to afflict), tribulum (a threshing board) and terere (to rub) - and thus does not seem to have any etymological link with tribus.
BUT, AS TRIBULATION MEANS "a cause of distress" or "a state of suffering", the link is powerful in my mind. Nothing has caused more distress and suffering in Africa than our colonial nurture into mutually suspicious tribes and the imposition of backbreaking tributes on those tribes.
Since the 19th century, ours has been a history of tribes, tributes and tribulations. The Latin tributum, from tribus, also produced the verb tribuere, which means "to grant" or, originally, "to distribute" among a "tribe" or "tribes". Note the verb to distribute. It has such relatives as to contribute and to attribute.
To con-tribu-te was to join others in paying a tribute into a kitty to be dis-tribu-ted (shared out to members of a tribus). When the kitty was full, it was at-tribu-ted (certified as belonging to the tribus) and given out to the agents for distribution.
Those who broke the rules were likely to face a tribunal, "a court of justice" composed of tribuni (singular: tribunus, also from tribus). In ancient Rome, a tribune (as the word has come into English) was an officer elected by the plebeians (that era's equivalent of our proletarians) to "protect" their interests.
Of course, this claim was as spurious as the pretence by the British colonial regime that the "Chief Native Commissioner" and his office - composed 100 per cent of Britons - represented the objective interests of all the tribes of what in 1920 was declared as the "Crown Colony of Kenya."
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