Philip Ochieng
15 June 2008
column
Nairobi — 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.
In Kenya, for instance, this objective pitting of "tribes" against other African "tribes" within a single colony was intensified through more subjective methods. For instance, white settlers simply appropriated highly fertile land from particular ethnic communities.
They then turned these into plantations, farms, ranches and parks, especially in what was to become known as White Highlands. This act affected mainly the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin. It naturally created landlessness among them and intense land hunger, where there had been none before.
It also produced a great army of young people who, because their families no longer had any land, found themselves idle. They thus became the first source of labour for the new white settler farms, plantations, ranches, households and urban administrative offices.
These idle youths also became the first source of a kind of crime and lumpenism hitherto unknown in our tribal societies - theft, robbery, begging, confidence trickery, mendicancy and prostitution.
However, even they soon proved inadequate as a source of cheap labour. So the colonial regime had to find other sources. They immediately found one by imposing a poll tax in cash on all adult male Africans.
To come by the cash - in a society which had not yet reached a cash economy - all young adult males were forced to leave their traditional bucolic settings to hire themselves out as labourers. Indigenous farming was thus hit very hard - in three ways.
First, all the best land had been forcibly taken by the whites. Africans remained only with marginal lands called "native reserves" (akin to the "reservations" into which the same Europeans had herded the Amerindians after robbing them of their lands and other property).
Second, the land was deprived of its most able-bodied traditional tillers who had now gone out to work for the settlers to earn cash to pay the tax for themselves and their fathers.
Third, because of the introduction of capitalist relations - with the individualism always concomitant with these - the communal spirit that had ensured self-sufficiency and individual social security had now been banished from the land and land rivalry began to affect peasant farming adversely.
Land hunger was thus introduced from outside. But, like most things, it had been introduced selectively, in accordance with which tribe had the most arable land - in Kenya's case, the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin.
The Kikuyu were the worst hit because they were the most populous of Kenya's ethnic groups and owned the best land, though with never as sprawling a reach as the land of the Kalenjin and the Maasai.
But even though the white settler farms attracted labour from the Luo, Luhya, Kisii, Kalenjin and other parts of Kenya, Kikuyu youths were the most numerous even in Nakuru District, the heart of white settler activity.
Nakuru is vital as the nucleus of a phenomenon to which January's election catastrophes can be traced. I mean the rise and development of the squatter system, whereby a ranch or plantation owner would allow a few labourers and their families to "squat" permanently inside his establishment.
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