allAfrica.com: Kenya: A Short History of Tribalism

WRITING IN THE NEW Yorker in 1990, Ray Bonner remarked that what Kenyans call "tribalism" is nothing but an irrational fear of the Kikuyu. Indeed, a study might reduce our "tribalism" to political rivalry between the elites of just two communities - Kikuyu and Luo.

That is the danger with competitive politics. Electioneering, in particular, can be so spectacular as to blind even the most intelligent commentator to an even more intense rivalry. I mean the silent agrarian conflict between two other communities -Kikuyu and Kalenjin.

Only on occasion - like last December and January - does such politics flare up violently enough to remind us, rudely, of what Comte de Saint Simon, the French philosopher, knew two centuries ago - that politics is but the "distilled expression" of economic interests.

More often than not, political clashes express the various class interests in a society. But in situations where ethnic consciousness still heavily outweighs national consciousness, the ethnic elites can, in self-pursuit, play their respective masses against each other. This is what we call "tribalism."

As the events of December and January showed, tribalism is a deadly elite game in which the common people of all ethnic communities are the net losers. Those now suffering in the IDP camps know no tribes.

Indeed, most of them come from three communities whose elites are the key beneficiaries of the present coalition government - Luo, Kalenjin and Kikuyu -whose intense political and economic rivalry frequently threatens to dismember this country.

The question is: How did these rivalries come about? Why should there be a special political conflict between Kikuyu and Luo, and not between Luhya and Kamba, say, or a special agrarian enmity between Kikuyu and Kalenjin, and not between the equally contiguous Taita and Maasai?

This question is vitally important because, in the pre-colonial days, whenever such tribal warfare occurred, it took place between two independent entities. Admittedly, these entities were ethnic. But they were independent. They did not subsist under a common political roof.

Thus such an inter-tribal war is a war between politically independent states. Therefore, it can no more be called "tribalism" than the frequent Franco-German wars of the Middle Ages could be called tribalism. Such a conflict is said to be interstatal (even though each state was still ethnic).

Modern tribalism, on the other hand, is not rivalry between independent states but rivalry within the same state. For that reason our tribalism can be described as intrastatal. Intrastatal tribalism such as besets Africa is the product purely of European colonialism.

It is the Berlin Treaty of l885 by which hitherto independent ethnic entities were captured and lumped together within single colonies, these entities arriving there with hopelessly disparate fortunes in terms of social advance and economic-demographical strengths.

TRIBALISM AS AN INTRA-statal phenomenon is thus always a colonial creation. Lenin, who called it The National Question in his pamphlet of that title - since "nationality" was his word for "tribe" - was deeply worried by this disparateness with which the various ethnicities had been swallowed by Russia's Romanov dynasty.

Nevertheless, one thing is clear. Intrastatal tribalism must thrive whenever the colonial regime, its creator, having not only deliberately failed to tackle the gross inequalities of fortune brought to the fore by lumping together various communities within the same political integument, then officially grants them "independence" and departs without giving them a further thought.

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was a direct result of the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire before it had even begun to think of solving the "national question" it had itself asked by lumping together various Balkan tribes within a single political entity.

The simmering war between Spain's Aragonians and Castilians, on the one hand, and the Andalusians, Catalans and Basques on the other, is also to be traced to Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburgs. In The African Condition, Mazrui reports as follows concerning our continent:

"On balance, the three most basic levels of identity that the Western impact has deepened among Africans are first the identity of 'tribe' as the different groups have competed for scarce resources in new territories created by the West.

"Secondly, there is the identity of the nation state as Africans go about calling themselves Nigerians or Kenyans as a result of boundaries created by the colonial powers." The third concerns racism - that special disease of the European mind - which is, however, irrelevant here.

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