A consensus seems to have emerged among Africanist academics that, while precolonial ethnicities, were fluid and negotiable, ethnic identities became increasingly rigid and singular during the colonial period. Academics argue that as a result of colonial administrative and economic practice, ethnic groups were categorised and labeled, and a colonial view of ‘tribal Africa’ was imposed, invented (Ranger, 1983), or imagined (Ranger, 1993; Iliffe, 1979). Although an idea of ‘tribal’ Africa resulted from the twin processes of colonial invention and African imaginings, this does not mean that ethnic units, their size, composition, content and allies, are fixed and unchangeable. Rather, ethnicities are ‘in an endless process of transformation’ (Waller, 1993:302); the ‘ambiguous, constantly contested and changing results of cultural politics; the outcome of an endless process in which they are always simultaneously old and new, grounded in the past and perpetually in the process of creation’ (Berman, 1998:311–312).
From this we can conclude that the notion of ‘an ethnic community’ is impossible to tie down or clearly define. No clear formula exists of what constitutes such a group, of what delimits membership and non-membership. However, there are a number of common elements associated with ethnicity as used in common parlance, including a level of linguistic and cultural similarity and geographic concentration, or at least a recognised ‘home’ area. However, just as a common language or culture can be used to assert unity, so distinctions of dialect and small variations in custom can be used to assert difference. When one explains the forging and maintenance of a sense of ethnic community, linguistic and cultural similarities must go together with an idea of shared interests, from which a discourse of important similarities and unimportant differences can flow. However, an ethnic community is not an interest group per se. Not only does it embrace ideas of intra-intelligibility, of shared language, cultural norms and social institutions, it also requires an idea of blood ties and a shared past, of common descent and a history of union. Such shared pasts do not have to be historically accurate, but they must hold a resonance with cultural traditions. An ethnic history cannot simply be invented from thin air; it must draw, however selectively, on memory and on histories, both written and oral.
That there is no clear formula for categorically declaring A, B, and C, to be an ‘ethnic group’, but not X or Y, is part of the terms’ utility. It allows academics and other observers to simplify their analyses by introducing a common referent for social groupings. The mutability of the term also enables agents on the ground to debate, contest and negotiate ideas of brother, cousin, friend, and foe; to forge new communities and alliances, and to question common perceptions regarding group boundaries, content and membership. It is this room for negotiation and re-negotiation which has, in part, enabled agents of all kinds to make use of the concept of ethnicity as a framework of action in different arenas, over different periods of time.
This paper will take the notion of ethnicities as complex and contested social constructions, ‘perpetually in the process of creation’, as its starting point. The aim is to reveal the ways in which ethnic boundaries, their relevant contents, allies, and members are actually contested and negotiated in Kenya today. Revealing, not only how ethnicities may evolve, but also how individuals and communities can, within limits, choose their ethnic identity, relevant ethnic history, and ethnic allies. Evidence is drawn from a number of case studies from Kenya's Rift Valley Province and Western Province, but the analysis has a wider resonance. I start with the Sengwer community in the northern Rift Valley.
The case of the Sengwer & their struggle for Kapolet forest
The Sengwer or Cherangani community are concentrated around the Cherangany Hills in the Northern part of Kenya's Rift Valley Province in a border area where three Districts, West Pokot, Marakwet and Trans Nzoia Districts, meet. Their numbers are unknown. According to David Yator Kiptum, Sengwer leaders previously estimated the community’s number at around fifty to sixty thousand, but now believe it is likely to be around thirty thousand, perhaps bolstered to fifty thousand if one includes others in Diaspora.2 The Sengwer's existence as a distinct ethnic group is currently both accepted and denied by the Kenyan Government. They were given a census code number, 081, at the last minute in 1999 after a census boycott was initiated.3 But there is no recognition of the community in the list of ethnic groups available to Kenyans when applications are made for a national ID card. Those who see themselves as Sengwer are often told when applying for an ID card, that they should choose to be a member of one of the neighbouring communities: Pokot, Marakwet or Keiyo.
Recognition of the Sengwer as an ethnic unit by the British Colonial Administration was just as patchy. The British initially recognised the Sengwer. In the early twentieth century, the Sengwer were frequently linked with Kenya's dispersed groupings of Ogiek or Ndorobo due to perceived commonalities.4 The ethnic labels Ogiek and Ndorobo are used interchangeably, and are generally associated with forest dwelling, hunter-gatherer communities, who traditionally did not keep cattle, and who are commonly believed to be indigenous to the area. The term Ndorobo is a Maasai word for a poor people without cattle.5 However, the official status of the Sengwer appears to have slowly dwindled as they became increasingly associated with the neighbouring Marakwet, and to a lesser extent Pokot and Elgeyo. Today, when recognised at all, the Sengwer are usually regarded as part of the larger Kalenjin grouping and are cited most frequently as a sub-section of the Marakwet. For example, Benjamin E Kipkorir, referred to the Sengwer as one of the ‘six ‘principal’ political (and probably) dialect groups’ that comprise the Marakwet group (Kipkorir, 1982:71), a statement echoed by Henrietta Moore (1986:16),6 and Andrew Fedders and Cynthia Salvadori (1979:63).
At the beginning of 2005, a group of so-called Sengwer were forcibly removed from Kapolet Forest, on the border of Trans Nzoia and West Pokot Districts. The official announcement was that the Government was removing illegal squatters who were endangering the environment by felling trees for timber and clearing areas for cultivation in a gazetted Government Forest and vital water catchment zone. However, the deeper and more contested local politics is much more complex and revealing of local identity politics. After outlining the Sengwer struggle for land since the early 1990s,7 attention will turn to how this case study, together with other examples, reveals the spaces available for the negotiation and renegotiation of ethnic identity in contemporary Kenya.
In 1993, President Daniel Arap Moi promised Kapolet Forest and three quarters of Milimani Farm, an Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) Farm in Trans Nzoia District8 to the Sengwer as settlement schemes. The manner in which this promise was made was very much in keeping with President Moi’s ad hoc policy-making style (Morton, 1998). At the official opening of the controversial Turkwel Hydro Electric Power Station on 6 October 1993, and in keeping with established genres of client political performance, Sengwer dancers entertained the President and petitioned him for land. The next day, after a further request for land by a community elder, President Moi, in front of an audience, directed the then Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner, the late Mr I. Chelanga, to see that the Sengwer were settled in Kapolet Forest and on Milimani ADC Farm.
Demarcation of Milimani Farm began in 1995. By the end of 1996, most of the plots had been allocated, but not to Sengwer. In March 1997, a group of over a thousand Sengwer invaded Milimani Farm, declaring that other communities and Govern-ment officials had benefited from the allocation process. The invaders remained on the farm for two months. During this period, some community members camped outside State House, Nakuru, in the hope of gaining an audience with President Moi. In the end, a compromise was reached between community leaders and the administration: the invaders would leave Milimani Farm and be settled in Kapolet Forest. The Sengwer agreed to the deal, with a certain degree of bitterness, holding that they had a right to both Kapolet Forest and Milimani Farm. In the end, it appears that in the face of threats, and a take it or be left with nothing stance by the Government, Sengwer leaders persuaded the invaders to leave the farm and to accept relocation.
The area commonly referred to as Kapolet Forest is made up of Trust Land and gazetted Government Forest.9 Phase I of the Kapolet settlement scheme began in 1998, and involved Trust Land areas. In 2000, Phase II began, but very little progress was made in processing land division and the area was never degazetted. In 2003, a Government Notice was issued, which declared that anyone living in a gazetted forest area illegally should leave by the end of the year. The Notice was later extended to the end of March 2004. After the March deadline, a forester visited the area. According to a local source, the forester told people that they had no right to be in Kapolet, that trees were to be planted in both phase II and phase I areas, and that people would be evicted unless they could prove ownership.10 In October 2004, a delegation visited the Trans Nzoia District Commissioner (DC) and, according to the same source, the delegation was told that even those Sengwer who had already been settled by the Government had no rights in Kapolet Forest, that people could not even collect dry wood, and that they had only been given the land because of ‘politics.’ The implication of this statement was that the original allocation was the result of ethnic patronage; Moi favoured the Sengwer because they are perceived as belonging to the larger Kalenjin cluster, from which Moi hails. After this rather unfruitful visit to the DC, the Sengwer invaded the Phase II area.
However, the majority of invaders came from deep in West Pokot District, and not from the areas in which the Sengwer have historically been concentrated. Moreover, they were people who, until relatively recently, had self-identified as Pokot. The Pokot are usually listed under the umbrella term ‘Kalenjin’ and are concentrated in West Pokot District and the western part of Baringo District. These ‘Sengwer-Pokot’ began meeting and corresponding with Sengwer around Kapolet Forest on a regular basis at the beginning of the decade, when people in West Pokot District became aware of the Kapolet Forest Settlement Scheme. Their claims of ‘being Sengwer’ were linked to claims of Sengwer ancestry. According to a local source these Sengwer-Pokot had been assimilated into the Pokot community but knew that their parents or grandparents were Sengwer.
In a Memoranda submitted to the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission by the Sengwer Indigenous Development Project on 10 July 2002, attention was brought to a relocation of Sengwer in the mid-1930s by the British colonial authorities. A District Annual Report from the time records how,
Following … the establishment of Native Forest Reserves in … Marakwet District, it became necessary to move certain Cherangani families from the forest areas if reservation was to be made effective … The Cherangani agreed to evacuate the Forest areas, and to surrender all rights thereto – provided they were allowed to move into West Suk … After consultation with, and agreement by the Suk Elders, the move of the Cherangani to West Suk was sanctioned and took place … The conditions upon which the move to West Suk was agreed to, were, that the Cherangani should become merged with the Suk, and receive no separate tribal recognition, and that they should be subject to Suk Chiefs, and Tribal Custom. To these conditions the Cherangani agreed. 11
It was obvious early in the proceedings that the Cherangani wished to move into Suk, on the terms of remaining a separate tribal entity from the Suk, with their own Chief or Headman. The DC, Kapenguria, was unable to agree to the move on such conditions in view of the complications which would arise from having Cherangani officially residing in two separate districts and under two separate Provinces. He would only reluctantly agree to the move at all … provided that the Cherangani in question agreed to surrender their tribal identity, and become entirely merged in the Suk, subject to Suk Chiefs, Headmen, and Native Tribunals, and bound by Suk Native Law and Custom … on re-assembling the Cherangani agreed unanimously to the conditions laid down, and the move was accordingly approved. 12
The situation was confused further by the fact that while some Sengwer-Pokot brought a number of their Pokot relatives, friends and neighbours with them into Kapolet Forest, other Sengwer-Pokot were followed by uninvited Pokot. It is, according to Sengwer leaders, these two groups of Pokot ‘intruders’ who were responsible for the mass clearing of trees, which forced the Government to remove people from the phase II area at the beginning of 2005. Since then, insecurity has increased with reports of cattle rustling and the murder of two forest officers. Blame for this rising insecurity is being placed firmly with the Pokot community; Sengwer leaders claiming that the Pokot are ‘using cattle rustling as a tool to chase other communities’ out of the area.13
This narrative is a contested one. According to Andrew Rotino, the Mayor of Kapenguria, and a Pokot, the series of events unfolded somewhat differently. To summarise the Mayor’s account: the British pushed the Sengwer and Pokot up into current West Pokot District in the 1920s. As a result, both communities became mixed up in the Pokot area. Kapolet is the ancestral land of the Sengwer and they mobilised themselves to grab this land. At the same time, many Pokot can identify themselves as Sengwer through their clans. In October 2004, the Sengwer invited those who identified themselves as Sengwer from West Pokot District to join them, enlarge their numbers, and force the Government to listen to them. These Sengwer from West Pokot District invited others to join them, as they could not leave their friends behind. The problem was, that once in Kapolet, people wanted to sideline those who were not Sengwer. At the same time, one Sengwer was illegally taking money from some Pokot as payment for an expected place on the list of right-holders in the settlement scheme. The Mayor further argued that people were not moved out of Kapolet at the beginning of the year by the Government, but by Sengwer, dressed up as security personnel, and mobilised by their leaders to remove non-Sengwer from the area. In comparison to Sengwer leaders, he wished for the unity of the Pokot and Sengwer, and for the Government to consider giving the land to both of the communities.14 The Mayor of Kapenguria's final recommendation is unlikely to be acceptable to Sengwer leaders who have long fought for a settlement scheme of their own.
These narratives of local level politicking are interesting and instructive on a number of levels. First, they expose how land debates have become increasingly complicated over time as the Government fails to stick to a hard and fast land policy, the administration fails to issue title deeds, and layers of conflicting claimants grow.
Secondly, these narratives expose the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that existed in British colonial policy and administration. If one views British colonialism as a clear set of ideas, processes, rules and regulations that were proscribed and duly carried out, it appears bizarre that a colonial administration which placed such emphasis on Africans being tribal, could at the same time ask people to become members of a different tribe. However, this apparent inconsistency was not a one off. In the same area a series of Colonial DCs from the 1930s on, became concerned with the presence of non-Pokot Africans in West Pokot District. The problem was not essentially their presence, but the fact that they refused to become Pokot.15
The issue for colonial administrators on the ground was one of administrative expediency. For a political system that used local chiefs and headmen to control its subjects, the question of how to control subjects who had no recognised and incorporated leadership was of pressing concern. The answer was quite simple, barring a radical change in colonial administration, such people had either to move back ‘home’ or become members of their host community, thus rendering themselves the subjects of local chiefs and headmen. Another example of this expedient approach to questions of tribal identity is that of the Ogiek and the problem that these dispersed, forest-dwelling communities posed to the Administration. In 1929, the Colonial Government appointed a Committee to examine the ‘Ndorobo question’; defining Ndorobo as ‘a general term including most kinds of hunting people … usually scattered families with no tribal organisation’, the Committee recommended that ‘wherever possible, the Dorobo should become members of, and be absorbed into, the tribe with which they have the most affinity’ (Colonial Office, 1934: 2131; 2133).16
These ambiguities of the imagined and forcefully produced ethnic categories of colonial administration provide an important background to current debates about political identity in Kenya. An administrative code based on a belief in the solidity of ethnicity, and the difficulties of its actual implementation as administrative practice, have combined with histories of inter-marriage, migration, ethnic incorporation and cultural borrowing, to create confused and complex narrative segments that provide contemporary political actors with ‘a multiplicity of enunciative procedures put into practice concurrently by the actors’ (Bayart, 1993:37). In the case of the Sengwer, community leaders have been asserting their difference from their neighbours, the Marakwet and Pokot, at the same time as they question the existence of a broad Kalenjin ethnic grouping, while simultaneously hinting at the existence of an alternative alliance, composed of Kenya's ‘indigenous peoples’. In short, a twin process of simultaneous ethnic contraction and expansion is being played out.
The Expansion & Contraction of Ethnic Communities
In the last twenty years there has been a marked tendency in Kenya for communities to emphasise the fact that they are distinct. A few examples from the Kalenjin grouping alone include the Sengwer, Endorois (Anderson, 2002:298–299), and Ogiik communities. Other examples from contemporary Kenya include the Tharaka, Suba, and Giriama, and a number of Abaluhya groups. It is tempting to refer to this process as one of ethnic fragmentation. However, the idea of fragmentation somewhat misleadingly suggests that a) there is an obvious unit, which b) breaks down into separate sub-units leading to c) the whole ceasing to exist. The idea of ‘asserting difference’ on the other hand, allows for the dual possibility that units may claim that they are distinct while affirming or denying the existence of a greater, corporative community or alliance.
Among the Sengwer, an articulation of ethnic difference, espoused in contests for symbolic and material resources, has developed in the last few decades. These leaders believe that the reason educated men are unable to find jobs, and the community is eking out a life on poor quality land with little government or NGO assistance, is primarily because the already small community is divided between three constituencies in three different districts. They feel marginalised by larger neighbours, who appear to care little for their predicament, and politically encumbered by the fact that they lack any community representative higher than a Deputy Mayor.17 Local recruitment drives for government service opportunities are one source of concern, according to local leaders:
The community is discriminated (against) in West Pokot, Marakwet and Trans Nzoia districts (where) only members of Pokot, Marakwet, Nandi and Luhya ethnic groups are considered, because either the districts belong to them or they are the dominant group. 18
Issues of access to, and control of land are also of vital importance. Sengwer leaders view Kenya as a country comprised of many Nations, and call for the recognition of Sengwer ‘territory’ and for Sengwer control of resources within these ‘ancestral lands’.20 Leaders dissatisfied with local experiences of scarce political and productive resources have come to attach great significance to the history of the Sengwer as a distinct ethnic unit and to small dialect and cultural differences between ‘them’ and their neighbours, a political stance that John Lonsdale has aptly labeled ‘political tribalism’ (1994).
Another ethnic identity currently being negotiated in Western Kenya is that of the Mount Elgon Ogiek or Ogiik. In 1970, the Kenyan Government initiated a process of relocation of people from Chepkitale, a moorland area above the forest line at the top of Mount Elgon, adjacent to the Kenya-Uganda border. They were moved lower down the mountain to an area known as Chebyuk. The relocation, according to official proclamations, was carried out for the benefit of the Chepkitale people, in an attempt at state incorporation of an isolated community. The process of allocation became, and remains, an issue of much debate and contention. At times, tension in the area over the identity of allocattees and size of land parcels in Chebyuk has become violent; houses have been burnt, and local residents injured and even killed. The problem is that the Government has carried out a number of fresh allocations over the years, each one being dogged by claims of bias, corruption and injustice, such that, today, people who live in the area are still insecure in their ownership, while multiple layers of claimants have grown.21
Recently a new dimension has been added to the allocation issues at Chebyuk, with some leaders of those claiming to be ‘from Chepkitale’ asserting that they belong to a different ethnic group than their neighbours. They are not Sabaot22 they claim, but Ogiek or even Ogiik. The term Ogiik referring to an indigenous people, similar to the Ogiek of the Rift Valley forests, except that while the Ogiek are hunter-gatherers, the Ogiik are pastoralists, although the term Ogiek is also often employed to refer to this community ‘from Chepkitale’.23 Others deny this assertion of difference holding that the only valid distinction is that the Chepkitale people are ‘Mosop’, those who live high up, and as a result of their relative isolation, remain truer to the culture of the original Sabaot.24 Some individuals have gone further and argued that Chepkitale leaders are confusing their people for personal and/or political gain. Regarding political motivations, it has been argued for example that, the Chebyuk Settlement Scheme ‘was created to promote internal wrangles amongst the Sabaot people and to divert attention from (their) Trans Nzoia and Bungoma claims’,25 suggesting that some Chepkitale leaders have been captured by outside interests.
While some debate the idea that the people from Chepkitale are Ogiek or Ogiik, distinct from their Sabaot neighbours, others take a halfway position. The idea that some Sabaot are also Ndorobo or Ogiek was articulated for example, by one Arap Kasisi in his evidence before the Kenya Land Commission on 8 October 1932. Kasisi asserted that he is Konyi (one of the groups commonly listed as a sub-group of the Sabaot), and that while ‘part of the tribe … have always lived up on the higher slopes of the mountain above the forest’, and while they now have stock when they used not to, these people from above the forest (i.e. from Chepkitale) ‘are part of our tribe – we are all Dorobo’ (Colonial Office, 1934:2080).
At times it appears that the term Ndorobo is invoked more as a claim to indigeneity, than as a reference to the socio-economic characteristics commonly associated with this identity (hunter-gatherers). Since neighbouring communities are all regarded as having migrated into the current area from the North and West, statements of being Ogiek or Ndorobo can be deployed as a basis for claims to original residency. However, the idea of ‘an indigenous people’ is, like the idea of any clear and bounded tribe or ethnic group, unsustainable due to complex and extended histories of migration, intermarriage, interaction and assimilation, not to mention the specific contexts from which the term ‘indigenous’ stems.
Regarding the Chebyuk settlement scheme, little consensus exists as to the ethnicity of the rightful claimants. Questions of local ethnic identities are confused further by the fact that the composition and origin of the Sabaot grouping is itself disputed.26 In this area of Mount Elgon District it is not quite clear who people are, or where the supposedly fixed and bounded lines of ethnic group lie.
The assertion of difference on behalf of the Sengwer and Ogiik has also been linked by some with a denial of ‘being Kalenjin’, and with the forging of closer ties between proclaimed ‘indigenous’ communities. While Sengwer and Ogiik admit that they speak a dialect that belongs to the Kalenjin cluster of languages, some question the relevance of the term ‘Kalenjin’, declaring it to be a mere political alliance formed in the mid-20th century to provide certain leaders with a support base.27 Arguments are then made that the Sengwer are different to other Kalenjin sub-groups because they are hunters and gatherers, who have lived in the area since ‘time immemorial’,28while the Kalenjin communities came from the North and settled around Mt Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border before they parted ways through a series of migrations.29 Through such appeals to historical memory, the Sengwer have distanced themselves from the broader Kalenjin alliance, and associated themselves with the Ogiek. This rejection of ‘being Kalenjin’ reflects dissatisfaction with the Moi and Kibaki regimes and a perception of imbalance in the workings of ethnic patronage networks.
While an ‘alliance’ of indigenous peoples is in its very early stages, the Sengwer and Ogiik have come to act in coalition with a number of Ogiek groups. The Sengwer began forging links with the Ogiek around 2002 and even submitted a joint memorandum with them to the Constitutional Review Commission.30 The interaction of these professed ‘indigenous’ groups indicates another area of potential negotiation, choice and innovation: ethnic amalgamation. An inherent part of the process of amalgamation is debate about relevant ethnic content. For example, some Sengwer have chosen to emphasise their historic links with the forest and other ‘Ogiek’ groupings, over their linguistic and cultural similarity to their Pokot and Marakwet neighbours. However, negotiation of ethnic content can also occur independently of ethnic amalgamation, for example, within Ogiek communities who must debate the meaning of ‘being Ogiek’ when ‘members’ no longer reside in forests and keep cattle.
The choice of language employed by the Sengwer and Mount Elgon Ogiek is highly significant. Leaders have consciously employed the ‘global discourses’ of ‘marginalisation’, ‘minority rights’, ‘indigeneity’, and ‘environmental protection’. These discourses have enabled these political actors to enter new international arenas of action, including the internet, international conferences and African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights.31 These discourses have also strengthened their community claims via references to international human rights legislation,32 and have enabled political actors to forge links with new allies, representatives and patrons, including NGOs like Minority Rights and Survival International. For example, members of the Enderois community, usually regarded as a sub-section of the Tugen, which is in turn regarded as a sub-section of the Kalenjin, have worked with Minority Rights to submit statements on the ‘The Human Rights Situation of the Enderois of Kenya’ to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights.33 This move onto the international stage is linked with the leadership’s growing dissatisfaction with local and national level political processes. By stressing their existence as an indigenous minority, while claiming to have special knowledge and the ability to protect local environments, Sengwer, Ogiek and Enderois leaders have gained access to new international forums, enabling community representatives, blocked from the Kenya Parliament, to enter new domains of action and cultivate new channels of patronage.
Numerous examples exist of Kenyans deciding to forge or create larger ethnic communities, with their own language, territory and history, at different points in the twentieth century. Examples include the Abaluhya, Sabaot and Kalenjin. The term Abaluhya stems from the name used by a number of linguistically similar communities for a fireplace around which community elders gather, and was coined as an ethnic referent in the late 1920s (Ogot, 1981:9). The term Sabaot was coined in the late 1940s.34 Its exact meaning is unclear since almost every person in Mount Elgon District gives a different story about the origin of this appellation. One recurring theme does emerge; the term was of recent origin and was coined by leaders in an attempt to unite or re-unite a number of linguistically similar communities.35 The term Kalenjin means ‘I say to you’ or ‘I tell you’, and was again used as a conscious instrument by Africans to forge a closer sense of community between a number of officially recognised tribes referred to collectively as the ‘Nandi-speaking’ peoples (Kipkorir, 1982). A more recent example of an attempt to build a broader ethnic alliance is KAMATUSA, or the Kalenjin, Maasai, Turkana and Samburu Alliance initiated in the mid 1990s by a group of Kalenjin politicians. Although this was cast as a political alliance, it was firmly based in a discourse of cultural similarity, each of these communities commonly being defined as Nilo-Hamitic groupings with a pastoralist tradition.
In each of these examples, a new incorporative identity was built using real cultural and linguistic similarities. However, conscious steps were also taken to increase the level of cultural and linguistic similarity. For example, in each case, bar KAMATUSA, a language committee was established and attempts made to develop a standard-ised language. In each of these cases, the processes of categorisation, invention and imagination, were the product of African agents, albeit African agents working within a framework of British colonial administration and ideology. These cases therefore stand as important counterweights to those analyses which highlight the role of European agents (colonial officials, missionaries and anthropologists) in the creation of ‘tribes’ to the neglect of African agents.
The boundaries of each of these alliances are not clear-cut. Whilst there is general agreement, for example, that the term ‘Kalenjin’ embraces the Nandi, Kipsigis, Elgeyo, Marakwet, Tugen, Sabaot and Pokot (although even the latter hold a somewhat peripheral position), it is more difficult to decide whether the Sengwer, the Sebei (who are based in Uganda but often grouped together with the Sabaot), the Terik (who are sometimes bracketed together with the Nandi), and/or the Ogiek should be included. However, unlike with the Mijikenda community where the number of sub-units is limited to the number nine, or the nine towns of the Mijikenda,36 the number of Kalenjin tribes is not fixed. It is therefore possible to count all of these communities as Kalenjin, or to mix and match them. A. T. Matson in his book on Nandi Resistance also adds another possible contender, the Tatoga of Tanzania (1972:2–3), while a lecturer at Egerton University also suggested the Barabaig of Tanzania.37 In turn the boundaries of each of the sub-groups of the Kalenjin are complex and contested, leaving ample room for negotiation and debate about individuals’ ‘true’ ethnicity. Moreover, many clans cross over sub-Kalenjin boundaries. Therefore, clans with the same name and totem are found in different Kalenjin sub-groups, providing another means by which members of one community can associate themselves with members of another.38
Membership & questions of inclusion & exclusion
While boundaries can be altered, membership and non-membership within a bounded ethnic unit can also be negotiated. At the beginning of 2005, a Committee of community elders compiled a list of the rightful allocatees for the Phase II area of Kapolet Forest. On one level the process was apparently easy. The question of who is, and who is not, Sengwer is clear-cut. People know who the Sengwer from West Pokot District are; people know each other’s family histories and trusted local leaders can be instructed to compile lists of names. When asked about how the Committee was going to make sure that only Sengwer were allocated land, it emerged that once the list was complete, an oath was to be administered, to insure the ‘true’ identity of the list members.39 This idea of an oath appears to be an admission that people could pretend to be Sengwer, but it also suggests that an oath could be used, not necessarily to test Sengwer-ness, but as a rite of passage, through which Sengwer-Pokot could solidify their claims to Sengwer ancestry. Negotiation of ethnicity when membership is understood in terms of descent is possible because people can re-interpret their lineage allowing mixed Sengwer-Pokot to emphasise Sengwer-ness based on the argued identity of grandparents.
This example of choice and negotiation, limited and structured by the past and the present, but also based on common perceptions of ethnic community or tribe, is not unique. Another example is that of the people of Lembus, in Koibatek District, who have at times in the past laid aside their common identification as Tugen to claim an association with their Nandi neighbours to the west. Here again, use is made of colonial history. In the late 1890s and early 1990s, when the British conducted a military campaign of conquest in the area, many Nandi are said to have fled into Lembus Forest, seeking refuge with their kin (Matson, 1972). Some latter day inhabitants of the area reasserted this history in the 1980s, in what appeared to be an attempt to divorce themselves from the politics of Baringo District, from the leadership of Daniel arap Moi and from the obligations they faced from their poorer neighbours on the plains of Baringo to the east and north. Lembus is now a heavily cultivated and relatively wealthy area where regular demands from distant ‘kin’ for access to pasture, especially during dry periods, are increasingly commonplace. Some of those in Lembus can also claim links with the neighbouring Elgeyo. Before the area was excised as a timber concession, in 1904, the extensive forest glades were used for grazing by Nandi, Elgeyo and Tugen communities. This complicated history of movement and integration makes the forest a particularly contested site of ethnicity, a place where people can lay claim to several different brands of Kalenjin identity (Anderson, 2002).
The potential to interpret one’s lineage and choose one’s ethnic identity is also revealed by the example of Masai political leadership. According to Marcel Rutten almost all of the formal Masai political elite ‘have mixed origins’, although ‘some are considered to belong more to the Masai society than others’ (2001:431). George Saitoti, the current Minister of Education, and former Vice-President, is perhaps the most famous example, as noted by Africa Confidential, ‘Saitoti, now identified as a Masai, started life as a Kikuyu and was known for years as George Kinuthia Muthengi’ (26 May 1995). Debates over ethnic identity do not necessarily cease, when individuals publicly associate themselves as A or B. Saitoti’s Kikuyu heritage opens him to criticisms of being an ‘outsider’, a ‘fake’, and a ‘puppet’ of outside interests. In turn, in Kapolet Forest, it seems likely that people’s ethnic identities will continue to be debated and contested; even today the position of invited Sengwer-Pokot and their Pokot friends in the area is uncertain.
Debating ethnicity
Debates over ethnic boundaries, content and allies can, and at times do, become extremely heated. While some communities may be willing to accept new members as a bolster to their numbers and political weighting, others may reject hangers-on if they view them to be a drain on community resources. At the same time, members of ethnic communities often resist assertions of difference by members of sub-groups. This resistance can occur at a number of levels. In the case of the Mount Elgon Ogiek, tensions have boiled over into violence on a number of occasions,40 but there has also been a war of words between culture-brokers as a struggle for authorship of ethnic realities is played out. For example, early in 2005, Godfrey Kipsisey, a Sabaot who works for the Bible Translation Center in Nairobi, wrote a letter to a Chepkitale leader, Dr J. Changeiywo, denying the existence of any distinction between the people of Chepkitale and other Sabaot. Kipsisey asked Changeiywo ‘as a fellow Sabaot to think of posterity and (his) own position in the community’, continuing with the question: ‘Do you want to remain a respected icon and a man who told the truth or a liar who peddled lies to the whole world in the name of “Ogiek rights”’.41
Last April, Dr. J. Changeiywo posted a bulletin on the Ogiek web site in reply, declaring Godfrey Kipsisey to be ‘the enemy of Chepkitale people and the truth’. According to Dr. Changeiywo,
Kipsisey and his group have decided to champion deceit and slander against the Chepkitale Ogiek leaders and members of their community, They have decided to use all the machinery and means available to cover-up the existence of the Chepkitale Ogiek so that when they will be carrying out genocide against the Chepkitale people, no one will know and raise protest or complain about it … They should be told to stop intimidating the Chepkitale Ogiek leaders through writing letter [sic], passing anonymous telephone calls and misleading the International Community. Denying the existence of Chepkitale Indigenous People (Ogiek) in Mt Elgon is genocide of the highest degree. 42
Conclusions: Identity politics in contemporary Kenya
Perhaps a more important development during the colonial period than the increasing rigidity of ethnic or tribal identities was the prominence that such identities gained. During the colonial period, Africans were encouraged to think and act ethnically (Iliffe, 1979), leaving a colonial legacy of control heavily reliant on local ethnic big men (Berman, 1998). In turn, people’s experiences and perceptions of the Kenyatta and Moi regimes (1963–1978; 1978–2002) did little to diminish the importance that ordinary people attached to questions of ethnicity. In brief, while many Kenyans denounce tribalism and call for non-ethnic leaders, a general consensus seems to exist that in the main, political actors, leaders, and their supporters think and act along social lines actualised as tribal. The common good in Kenya, if one can call it that, is development and access to land. However, while the former is often understood to be discrete and divisible, the latter is often considered in the sense of rights to ethnic ‘territories’ (Medard, 1999). Development thus comes to be understood as the bringing of gifts to an area – the construction of a road, hospital, school or factory, and jobs for community members in government service, while access to land becomes linked with the idea of territorial units, or spheres of ethnic influence. Residents of other communities are often referred to as ‘guests’; a status easily lost when ‘guests’ gain title deeds or become involved in local politics, or when a window appears for the transfer of land ownership from ‘guests’ to ‘locals’.
A high degree of ambiguity surrounds questions of ethnic identity. It is this ambiguity and the room for the negotiation and renegotiation of ethnicity, which makes it such a valued political resource in the dramaturgy of Kenyan politics. On the one hand ethnic politics is seen as an affliction leading to burnt homes and inefficient resource distribution. At the same time, the African sense of community is often held up with pride in contrast to the declared individualism of the West. Kenyans of all kinds gain social status by being wealthy and generous. Furthermore, Kenyans face significant social stigma for being selfish and for not assisting their kinsmen. It is not just that leaders will lose support bases, but that church leaders may well lose their congregations or professionals may be cursed or labelled as users of witchcraft, if they do not help out others (cf. Austen 1993; Geschiere, 1997). Acts of generosity and the maintenance of links with one’s rural home are thus about the development and maintenance of support bases through the building of social status and cultivation of images of civic virtue (Lonsdale, 1994).
The fact that many Kenyans understand issues of ethnicity to be central to local and national level politics leads to a tendency amongst Kenyans and outside observers alike to view everything through an ethnic lens. People pick up on the bits and pieces of evidence that fit an ethnic logic and force other bits to mould to its shape. Questions of ethnicity are often central to the political reality in Kenya, but the simplification of everything down to ‘ethnic politics’ obscures other possible dimensions and nuances of political networking and action. This simplification of political dynamics means that to many an anti-corruption crusade becomes an ethnic witch-hunt; a policy to invest in marginal areas becomes an attempt to draw certain minorities into an ethnic coalition, whilst policies to invest in high capacity areas appear as food for the Kikuyu. In turn, for many, a lack of development and/or land is seen as being simply the result of the marginalisation of their ‘community’, by other ‘tribes’, or by members of a broader ethnic grouping. As shown in this article, feelings of marginalisation can lead community leaders to assert their difference to their neighbours, and in some cases to forge new alliances to strengthen their voice. The argument, therefore, unfolds thus: we cannot expect politician X to fight for, protect and promote our interests because we are not of his community. Moreover, instead of arguing against the system as perceived, against systems of ethnic patronage, for example, these actors show an acceptance of the system, declaring that what they need is a representative of their own who will fight for, protect and promote their interests.
Ethnic identities in Kenya are thus not clear-cut and unproblematic, but are ambiguous and open to negotiation and renegotiation. Local ethnic alliances can both contract and expand, even simultaneously depending on the nature of the ends being pursued. The Sengwer provide an excellent example of these twin processes. While Sengwer leaders have distanced themselves from the politics of Marakwet, West Pokot and Trans Nzoia Districts and their ‘Kalenjin’ neighbours, the Sengwer have forged a new alliance with other ‘indigenous minorities’. These developments reflect a simultaneous retreat from District level politics matched by a rush towards the international stage, Sengwer leaders having embraced the international discourses of minority rights, marginalised minorities and the notion of indigenous communities as owners of specialised local knowledge. Leaders are thus utilising new discourses and channels outside local established patronage networks, to make old demands. In the process deploying one possible reading of complex ‘ethnic’ histories and current realities, to create an identity that seems to best serve their interests in a political environment where one’s ethnicity is viewed as central to one’s ability to access political and productive resources.
Recognition and analysis of these local realities of contested and shifting alliances is central to understanding Kenyan politics at the national level. Processes of forming and sustaining ethnic coalitions have dominated Kenyan politics throughout the post-colonial period. The Kenyan African National Union (KANU) and the Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) were, from their formation in 1960, fragile coalitions of ethnic communities, brought together initially by two conflicting logics of an independent Kenyan state (Anderson, 2005). Moreover, with the return of multi-party politics in the early 1990s, and the heightened competition and increased benefits of defection that this change has brought, the processes of forming and sustaining a winning coalition have become even more central to national level politics in Kenya. Parties are to a large extent, ethnic coalitions, but these coalitions are not formed from obvious and clear-cut ethnic blocs. Instead, each ethnic grouping has the potential to break down, reform, or ally with new partners. The local level politics of which are vital to understanding why the social groupings of ‘being from’ Nyeri, Murang’a or Kiambu, for example, hold a significance equal to that of ‘being’ Kikuyu or KEM (Kikuyu-Embu-Meru) in Kenyan politics.
Newspaper Articles
Africa Confidential , 26 May 1995, ‘Kenya's Clothes’, 36, 11
Daily Nation , 24 March 1997, ‘Group invades ADC farm: Members claim Moi gave them land’; 13 May 1997, ‘Officials Tour Disputed Farm: Sengwer ordered to leave’.
The People , 4–10 April 1997, ‘Clan stays put on T-Nzoia farm’; 13–19 June 1997, ‘Where govt learnt ADC of squatting’.