Onyango Oloo
18 September 2008
opinion
During the 2007 election campaign period and beyond some of the most virulent hate messages of an ethnic kind were to be found spilling over in Kenyan online communities, largely populated by young to middle aged Kenyans living in places like the United States, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, India and other places overseas. I was once one of those Kenyans living for years and years in Toronto and Montreal
For the almost two decades that I resided in Canada I became quite perplexed and intrigued by the reckless display of rabid ukabila on display at various online Kenyan forums.
Many of the worst Kenyan tribalists in cyberspace have lived for years in such cosmopolitan and liberal urban locales such as Oakland, Boston, Toronto, Leeds, Dallas, St. Paul, Chicago and Washington DC.
Offline, these Kenyan immigrants and naturalized citizens in the West share the collective plight of other people of colour when it comes to systemic racism and discrimination. Some of them are married to Asian-Americans, Jamaican- Canadians, Zambians, Greeks and Iranians not to speak of fellow Kenyans from the very same ethnic groups they bash online about.
Why do you find the stubborn survival of the INNER MKABILA in persons who last lived in a village twenty or thirty years ago? The sad thing is that you will be startled to discover such tribalists to be loners who DO NOT even contribute to community development within the tribes they keep praising online.
One more manifestation of crude tribalism has to do with a discussion groups that many Kenyans do not even know about. For instance there is this place which is an online community discussion forum that is RESTRICTED to ETHNIC Waswahili who are also Muslim. Now, some of the people who are active in that group including at least some of its founders are dear friends of mine, but I would be DISHONEST if I did NOT DENOUNCE them for their narrow ethnic bigotry which has clear overtones of racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia, some of it a stubborn holdover from the pre-colonial Master/Slave relationships between Wangwana na Watwana at the Kenyan Coast a relationship that had the so called "Bwambadi" lording over the so called "Wafirika" whether they were local Mijikenda or upcountry "watu wa bara." To become a member of the group, one has to be introduced by a member of the forum who will verify that the prospective individual of the requisite pedigree. That is why someone like Onyango Oloo, even though I have adopted Mombasa as my hometown and I am quite comfortable in Kiswahili, will never be deemed worthy to join this cloistered cultish cybercommunity.
I find it comical that most online tribalists shun the ethnospecific forums like jaluo.com, kikuyu.com, kisii.com etc to come to the more NATIONAL and INCLUSIVE forums like Kenyaonline, Jukwaa or Africa-oped to broadcast their tribal stupidity. It is almost as if they are acknowledging the obvious- you can only distinguish yourself ethnically from others in a Kenya national forum where there are people from diverse backgrounds. Ironically, as a GENERAL RULE these so called ethnic forums frequently are the LEAST TRIBAL of the Kenyan forums.
SHINING A TORCH ON MIJIKENDA VERSUS SWAHILI/WAARABU TENSIONS
Kenyan mainstream politics for the last forty years has been dominated by the discourse of the so called Luo/Gikuyu schisms and privileges in the cabinet, in parliament and other aspects of national life.
To those of us who subsist on a trenchant class analysis the punditry that ascribes everything to tribal machinations and ethnic arithmetic is not only simplistic and reductionist, it has tended to trivialize other even more deep seated conflagrations simmering under the surface in which ethnicity is definitely a factor.
Any Kenyan who is familiar with the history of this region is aware of the potent and potentially toxic mix of ethnicity, religion, race, class and political factions.
I will speak more about Mombasa because I am more familiar with it having lived there for more than half of my life.
The British colonialists exploited these divisions when it maintained a buffered colour coded stratified society that put the European conquistadors at the top, the Arabs and the Indian rentier and dukawallah strata slightly below that with the Waswahili and Wadawida enjoying a relatively "privileged" access to the uneven spoils of orthodox colonialism compared to say, the Mijikenda indigenous communities.
The presence of migrant workers from the Kamba, Manyala, Luo, Gikuyu, Somali and other Wabara ethnic groups from as early as the mid 1930s in places like Shika Adabu, Mtongwe, Mwandoni, Mshomoroni, Chaani, Kibarani, Miskiti Noor, Magongo, Tudor Estate, Buxton, Manyimbo, Sparki and Shimanzi introduced a permanent sticking point to those saw external intrusion not so much in terms of the foreign imperialists who took over Kenyan land throughout Kenya but in much more simplistic terms in terms of who spoke the language and practiced what religion.
The early migrants from upcountry were largely working class and seamlessly got accepted and assimilated in many Mombasa and surrounding neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, Kamba settlers at Shimba Hills and Luo plantation workers at Ramisi Sugar Mill or the Manyala port workers living in Shika Adabu and Mtongwe were not viewed in any hostile manner, by and large- same with the Miraa Meru businessmen at Mwembe Tayari or the Gikuyu shopkeepers and bar owners of Buxton, Tononoka, Sparki, Changamwe, Magongo and Mtopanga. Place in the mix immigrants from Tanga, Tanzania, Wangazija from the Comoros, Waziba (Hayas, many of them sex workers) from Bukoba, Wanyarwanda and of course the various waves of Ugandans especially from the early seventies when Idi Amin Dada came to power.
The large local South Asian communities in Mombasa were bolstered by Ugandan and Tanzanian Ismailis and there were quite a few Arabs from Zanzibar who resettled in Mombasa. We do know of course, the visible presence of Italians in Malindi. I still cannot forget the shock I got in 1975 when I found out that the wife of our new Kamba neighbour in the Jomo Kenyatta/Kipchoge Keino area near the Saba Saba Bar was this Malindi raised Italian-Kenyan woman who could trash talk you fluently with the eloquent Kiswahili of an indigenous Mswahili. Her mother was even more well versed and if possible even more foul mouthed in Kiswahili. They were such sweethearts those neighbours and I never once heard them refer to themselves as "Italians".
In the sixties and seventies a palpable resentment started growing when many people associated with Jomo Kenyatta were seen to be grabbing prime real estate land and beach properties merely because of their proximity to the octogenarian despot. Other people have done much more extensive research into the patterns of land and property ownership at the Coast Province, so I will very shortly direct you to at least one such link.
The Mijikenda is the collective name given to a cluster of nine tribes including the Ribe, Rabai, Kambe, Kauma, Giriama,Duruma, Chonyi, Digo and the Jibana and loosely associated with the Pokomo of Tana River. click here
Almost more than many other Kenyan nationalities, land and the national environment play a central and highly hallowed sacred role in the lives of the Mijikenda .The Kaya Forests are especially revered...
The Mijikenda communities are very complex and unique For instance, a profile of the Duruma, one of the sub tribes of the Mijikenda, reveals very interesting connections to Somalia, Mozambique, escaped slaves, Islam, Christianity and the growth of the Kiswahili language.
And speaking of the Waswahili, I have been astounded to witness the thick blanket of unadulterated ignorance with which my fellow Kenyans (especially my fellow Luos) persist in covering themselves when it comes to discussing our national language of Kiswahili and its origins.
When we were kids in primary school (and by "we" I mean those of us who grew up in the sixties and early seventies) we were indoctrinated with the following potpourri of colonial racist myths and neo-colonial tribal lies:
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