Kenyans gather at Embu Stadium for Madaraka Day celebrations on June 1, 2023.
No country is an ethnic or racial monolith in the modern world. All countries on earth are multinational. It’s true that some countries are nearly homogenous. Every country lives with diversity and difference.
Many countries have hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnic and racial groups domiciled in them. In terms of governance and social cohesion – in culture, linguistics, and other forms of identity fracture – diversity can be a challenge especially in the face of discrimination and exclusion. In severe cases, ethnically and racially broken states have collapsed.
No African country is a racial or ethnic monolith. Even Somalia, which has a high degree of homogeneity, isn’t owing to its Bantu and clan identities. In Kenya, identity poses serious challenges.
As I have written before, and reiterate here, all African states, including Ethiopia that escaped colonisation, are products of the Age of Empire. Ethiopia’s borders were impacted by the colonial scrambles for Africa. For the rest of the continent, colonial invasions and occupations go back many centuries. South Africa, Mozambique, and others were created by conquest centuries ago while the rest were divvied up at the Berlin Conference.
Coercion and fraud
The amalgamation of many pre-colonial nations into the extant modern African states were creations of colonial violence, conquest, fraud, and occupation by European imperialists. Africans didn’t create the states and countries they claim as theirs today. It’s difficult governing any state, let alone one that was created by colonial coercion and fraud.
I need not belabor the simple fact that Kenya is a work in progress, a state in embryo. This developmental stage has its own unique challenges. These include existence in an international state, legal, and economic system and order that relegate African post-colonial states to either irrelevance, exploitation, subordination, or exclusion from global decision making.
In geopolitical terms, African states matter only when the vital strategic interests of major world powers are implicated. Today, those interests are economic, the scramble for strategic resources, and most importantly, security. Otherwise, Africa is a backwater that’s an afterthought. Africa’s peoples either don’t matter, or are collateral damage. In this hostile environment, it behooves African elites to think long and hard wherefore they exist.
Kenya is one data point in geopolitics. This means that the Kenyan state, and especially the elites that run it, must first and foremost look inwards so that they can intelligently look outwards. Foreign policy must always be a function of domestic policy. What do we want for ourselves as a country? What do we want our present and our future to look like? What do we want for our children and children’s children? Do we want a broken society, or a resilient, progressive state in which each one of us can realise their full potential? To wit, do we want to be each other’s keeper? Or do we want to nurture a society of dimwits and looters? What do we want our standing in the region and the world to be?
Scarce resources
This brings me to our diversity, or difference of identities, and how we manage them so that they are a strength and not a weakness. Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of our inability as a society to manage our diversity and the exploitation of our scarce resources. The deplorable violent conflicts along the Mwingi-Garissa corridor are an abomination. The attacks and retaliatory responses speak of our inability to anticipate and respond adequately to root causes of ethnic diversities. That fracture is frightening and speaks to our inattention to building a nation of citizens of equal worth and dignity. But the larger question is our failure to realise and internalise the simple fact that we are a country of minorities cobbled together by the British.
In a country of minorities, no one community can be viewed, or view itself, as more important than any other. Let me break it down further. Kenya’s two largest groups – the Kikuyu and the Luhya – each stand at between 14-17per cent. The Kalenjin are third at 13 per cent while the Luo and Kamba are almost at parity between 10-11 per cent.
These five groups constitute about 65 Per cent of Kenya’s population. The Somali, Meru, Kisii, Mijikenda, and the pastoralist communities of the Turkana, Masai, and Samburu among others range from two to six per cent each. It’s clear that although the economic strengths of these communities differ – with the Kikuyu being stronger economically – no one community is a majority. This means that all our communities must co-exist with equity for us to prosper as a state, nation, country, and government.
Finally, let me sound a warning. It’s become cliché to say Kenyans do not have a spare country. This is true. Nor do any other peoples on earth unless the moon and other planetary constellations become habitable and pragmatic escapes from the earth. All Kenyan groups must transfer their primary loyalties from their ethnic cocoons to Kenya so that they are Kenyans first and whatever else second. They must develop a Kenyan zeitgeist.
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Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. @makaumutua.
