The political economy of ethnic identities in Kenya

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 in the Coast Province so allow me leave this at that.

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.

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:

“The Waswahili are a mongrel race, and their language developed when the mixed breed of Arabs and the local Bantus spontaneously started THEIR OWN language by mixing and matching Arab and Mijikenda words when they were playing in the dirt.”

I mean, how stupid can you get?

There is a reason why we refer to the languages we speak at home as our mother tongues.

Where in the world have you ever witnessed this strange phenomenon where 13th century toddlers cobble a brand new language in the compound outside their huts while their Giriama mothers fry the Kadzora and their Arab fathers sip some kahawa tungu inside while waiting for the chapatis?

Languages simply DO NOT develop that way.

In any case, when we are studying a language, we should pay far more attention to its morphology and syntax rather than to its vocabulary.

If we were to use vocabulary as a scientific yardstick to identify the historical, cultural and geographic origins of a language, where would we end up with English where it is estimated that up to 80% of the vocabulary is borrowed from other tongues(just to cite a mere handful of common examples, the word “thug” is from India, “tomato” and “tobacco” are from the Indigenous People of Turtle Island aka the Americas, and we are not even going to bother with words like rendezvous, zeitgeist, angst, origami, sushi, rickshaw, tofu, Jehovah, opera, sonata, soprano, contralto, safari, samba, mambo, salsa, bolero, cuisine, haute couture, sang-froid, Jacuzzi, zamboni, banshee, zombie, voodoo, juju, obeah, calaloo, marijuana, algebra, alchemy, nirvana or zen).

In sharp contrast to that colonial upumbavu, the historical facts about Kiswahili is today beyond dispute.

Kiswahili is an AFRICAN language, in fact, a BANTU language, despite the copious terms it has borrowed from Arabic (and even then, when it imports a word ending in a consonant, it immediately Africanizes and Bantufies said word so that Ahmed becomes Hamadi, Khamis, becomes Hamisi, Shukran becomes shukrani, and Omar becomes Omari and so on).

To see how close Kiswahili is to its Bantu cousins, try and compare some words in KiRabai, Zulu, Lingala and Shona respectively and if you are familiar with Kiswahili you will guess their meaning without knowing those languages in question.

It is therefore, not that difficult to make the case that Kiswahili is definitely an African, specifically a Bantu based language and not, as some local, uninformed strangers would posit, an import smuggled in from the Arabian peninsula.

It is said there are at least fifteen lahaja (dialects) of Kiswahili from Ki a’amu on the northern Kenyan coast, Kimvita (Mombasa) Kiunguja (Zanzibar) Kipemba (Pemba) Kimrima (around Dar es Salaam) Kitangata to Kingwana in the eastern Congo.

Many of the purist coastal Waswahili scoff at the Congolese Kiswahili (Kingwana) as being imperfect and riddled with grammatical errors, yet the Wangwana respond that at 9 million native speakers of that local dialect, they are the single largest bloc of Kiswahili speakers in the Swahili world that encompasses southern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, northern Mozambique parts of Malagasy, the Comoros, Seychelles, pockets of South Africa, a very big chunk of Oman and entire neighbourhoods in the United Arab Emirates.

What further complicates the discourse in Kiswahili is the way in which affiliated African tribes have been collapsed and conflated into being Waswahili when in fact, they are distinct ethnic groups with unique histories.

One such group is the Bajun, found in southern Somalia and the northern Kenyan coast Malika, the legendary Kiswahili speaking taarab diva known most for her Vidonge monster hit, is actually a Somali citizen with Bajun and Banadir ancestry.

About three years ago, when I was living in Montreal I called up a family friend of mine, a Kenyan married to a Tanzanian. Since she had grown up in Mombasa, I had always assumed that she was a “Mswahili”. She surprised me when she clarified that she was a Mgunya from Lamu who were distinct from Wa’amu and also the Bajun.

She explained to me that the Wagunya are found in three islands along the Kenya/Somalia border- Ras Kitao, Ras Kiambini and Ras insecure?wa. She said that the Wagunya are originally Black African Bantus although there has been intermarriage over the centuries.

She intrigued me further by revealing to me that among the Bajun for instance, you will find Caucasian skinned, blue eyed Bajuni who had Portuguese forbears, Bajuni who had Chinese features, Bajuni who looked like Arabs and Bajuni who had a midnight black African complexion. In the nearby islands Pate (two hours by boat from Lamu you found the Wapate who had their own unique dialect and also north of Lamu you met the Washela who pronounced words in their own peculiar way.

I asked her about the “Wabwambadi” and she informed me that it was actually a pejorative, class based term to refer to those coastal peoples who claimed Arab ancestry and saw themselves as aristocratic high borns who could not mix with the local Watwana. In fact she told me that until quite recently her people the Wagunya, could not inter marry with the Wa’amu who looked down on them as descendants of slaves.

When I told her that many, many years ago I used to have a Mswahili lover from Mombasa who was actually a Mu’amu from Lamu, she was shocked because a non Muslim Luo from upcountry, no matter how Swahilized was in traditional terms not considered good enough to talk to, let alone approach and have an intimate sexual and long term relationship with a mwanamwali from an indigenous Swahili family. Well, times have changed, that is all I can say about dating the daughters of the Waswahili, dear readers men and women in their ordinary everyday lives are saying no thanks to all these internalized racist, tribal, religious walls that separate human beings from each other.

Who are the Washirazi, I asked?

These were the people, I was told, who came from Iran, known until recently as Persia.

What complicates matters is when the Coastal peoples of East Africa migrate and relocate to the Middle East. I was talking recently to a very good friend of mine who is an Abu Dhabi-Canadian who just so happens to be a Mgikuyu Muslim woman who was born in Nyeri but grew up in the United Arab Emirates since the late 1970s.

She told me that many of the countries in the Gulf have xenophobic tendencies and they will look down on ANYONE who is not indigenous, irrespective of whether they are “Arab” or not. She told me of instances where local Gulf Arabs with dark African complexions expressed disdain for light skinned “ Arab” transplants from East Africa and further explained to me that even on the question of Arab identity there is no consensus and certainly you can not reduce things to skin colour- a local Dubai resident will not give a hoot for any Wamangas, advising them to go where they came from-Oman… So you have the phenomenon of a Kenyan “ Arab” boarding a plane from Port Reitz in Mombasa and landing in the Gulf only to learn that he too is considered a khal(black spot) or worse, referred to as an abd (black servant/slave). So all those colour coded social gradations mean nothing all in a context where family lineage and clan pedigree counts for much more.

I further queried my friend about the so called “Wamanga” and I was told that this was the Kiswahili term for Omani Arabs who had settled in East Africa. The Mazrui dynasty was considered to be Wamanga.

Of course I was very familiar with the Mazrui name for it has produced several internationally known Kenyan personages:

Professor Ali Mazrui’s father was the Chief Kadhi and a much respected Islamic scholar. Mbaruk al Amin Mazrui led an armed uprising against British colonial annexation in 1895-96;

Dr and Prof. Alamin Mazrui of Ohio State University is not only one of the most recognized Kiswahili linguists and academics along with the Leipzig based Prof. Abdilatif Abdalla-both of them are veterans of the Kenyan anti-imperialist movement- Dr Alamin Mazrui was detained by Moi in 1982 and is the author of the seminal Kiswahili play Kilio Cha Haki while Prof. Abdilatif Abdalla was imprisoned in 1969 by Kenyatta and composed his poetry collection Sauti ya Dhiki at Kamiti where they both served stints.

One cannot speak about the history of resistance to foreign domination in Mombasa over centuries without invoking the Mazrui family name as you can see when you peruse this link. I was actually shocked to find the Kenya government’s own ministry of foreign affairs agree with me in this regard.

Likewise, one cannot understand the contemporary tensions and conflicts between the Wamanga, Waswahili, Washirazi, Wagunya, Wa Bajuni and other largely Islamic Swahili affiliated communities of Lamu, Kilifi, Kwale and Mombasa districts on the one hand, and the various mostly Christian and animist Mijikenda communities all over the Coast Province on the other hand without factoring in the terrible twin legacies of the East African Slave Trade and the subsequent colonization of Kenya by both the Germans and the British.

ON KENYANS WHO ARE ETHNIC SOMALIS

The notion of the Kenyan nation has developed in struggle with the machinations of colonialism and necolonialism which paradoxically wanted to lump different tribes and nationalities together into one state while SIMULTANEOUSLY using divide and conquer tactics of tribalism, regionalism, racialism and religious difference.

But we all share a KENYAN identity that flows from our common, collective historical experience of a people ruled by the same British invaders, land grabbers, thieves and looters like Lord Delamare and their ilk.

It is this experience that enables someone like Onyango Oloo, whose ethnic cousins are the Acholi , Lango and Padhola of Uganda; the Alur of the Congo; the Dinka and Nuer of the Sudan and the Anywak of Ethiopia- this is what makes me call myself a KENYAN, sharing a NATIONAL identity with a Zarina Patel and a Davinder Lamba whose ancestors are from the Indian sub-continent; a Leonard Mambo Mbotela whose slave ancestors are from Malawi; a Najib Balala some of whose forbears have roots in the Arabian peninsula; a Mwandawiro whose ethnic relatives are the Pare of Tanzania; a Ngugi wa Thiongo who can dig up the seeds of his family tree very close to Kinshasha; a Moody Awori whose own brother ran for President in Uganda in 2002; a Yusuf Hassan, Mohammed Ibrahim or Nimo Gulleid who may have kith and kin among the Issaq of Hargeisa, the Hawiyes and Daroods of Mogadishu or the Baajun of Kismayu; an Ole Ntimama who may have uncles in Arusha or Namanga or a Richard Leakey who comes from British stock.

To be a Kenyan can not be reduced simplistically to ethnicity.

And the case of the Somali speaking peoples of Kenya offers the BEST PROOF of what I am saying.

For a variety of reasons, Canada is home to close to half a million ethnic Somalis from Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia itself. Following the collapse of the Somali state in the early nineties many people from that tortured land of great promise reverted to narrow clan identities. Among these ethnic Somalis resident in Canada are approximately 20,000 KENYAN nationals.

Even though they are identical in terms of physical features, Kenyan Somalis are quite distinct from ethnic kith and kin from across the northern Kenyan border.

They are referred to as "Sijui".

And you know WHY?

Because more often than not, in the early days at least, when say, someone from Hargeisa, Baidoa or Mogadisho went over and said " Nabat" (Hello) to an Halima from Eastleigh, Nairobi or a Yalahow from Wayani, Mombasa or to an Aida from Kambi Somali, Nakuru, what the Somali nationals would get from ethnic Somali Kenyan nationals would be blank stares followed by a mumble, “Sijui Kisomali" meaning " I cannot speak the Somali language"!

So what language did many of these KENYAN ethnic Somalis speak?

Take a wild guess.

Kiswahili of course!

The HISTORICAL experiences of ethnic Somalis in our country has given them a stamp of national identity that today makes them have more in common with Kambas, Merus, Kisiis and Turkanas than with the far flung tribal communities in Puntland.

Kenyans in northern Kenya in places like Mandera, Wajir, Garissa underwent unspoken atrocities and endured a lot of humiliation as second class citizens in their own country.

Finally in the mid 1960s they decided to do something about the genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns of both the colonial and neocolonial governments of Kenya.

Since 1903 there had been a PERMANENT STATE OF EMERGENCY in the so called NFD.

The so-called Shifta rebellion had secessionist aims.

The problems faced by the North Kenyan peoples are rooted in imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism and can only be tackled in the context of solving the National Question in Kenya along consistent democratic and social justice principles that affirms the right of ALL Kenyan people to determine their destiny.

As a Kenyan who is NOT ethnic Somali I know the kind of propaganda and prejudices that I was fed over the decades by our own government to try and convince me that my compatriots in Mandera, Wajir and elsewhere are not Kenyans.

When I was at Kamiti prison between 1982 and 1987, I spoke to former Kenyan soldiers who described their brutal raids against Somali communities in northern Kenya- they had been indoctrinated, just like those American youths dying for Bush, Rumsfeld and Haliburton in Iraq that they were fighting “foreign enemies” instead of their own fellow Kenyans.

The North Eastern province is still the MOST underdeveloped among all the regions of Kenya. Even today many northern Kenyans when they are bidding bye to someone bound for Nairobi will say, “ Please say to those Kenyans” underscoring their ambivalent attitude towards the neocolonial state which embraces them and spurns them simultaneously. In this context their identity as a people is contested and challenged by their lived experience of blatant state oppression and discrimination.

CONCLUSION: NAVIGATING CONSTRUCTED SOCIAL IDENTITIES IN THE KENYAN CONTEXT

I have endeavoured to demonstrate that ethnicity, tribe, race and other identities, far from being “genetic” “innate” and “primordial” are actually socially constructed, historically determined experiences that interplay with contemporary political realities in a complex and non-linear way. The phenomenon we know as “tribalism” in Kenya is a tool often employed by cynical and conniving politicians who often incite poor working class, lumpen and peasant populations to rise up against equally deprived communities to push very nefarious agendas of the same politicians who are UNITED by class and other elitist interests.

In tacking social issues camouflaged by the “tribal” veneer, progressive Kenyans must revisit history and examine the terrible legacy of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, even as they strive to unite diverse Kenyan communities to fight together for national independence, democracy, social justice and equality across gender, generational, regional and yes, ethnic identities.

* This is the second part of a two part paper. Part 1 of this paper appeared in Pambazuka News last week.

* Onyango Oloo is Secretary General Social Democratic Party of Kenya Nairobi. This paper was delivered at the Goethe Institute, Nairobi on June 18, 2008.

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/