Our identity: From colonial ties to modern difficulties

The modern nation-state is often a mix and match of different races, ethnicities, religions, cultures, philosophies, ecologies etc. What we call Kenya today was a cobbling together of different peoples, some who were often sworn enemies; different climes; different races; and different cultures.

The colonial made a Suba to belong to the same political and economic order as a Teso, a Pokot, a Duruma, an Arab, a European and an Indian etc.

These individuals were tagged as Kenyans by being issued with a document – an identity card, a birth certificate, a travel permission or a tax receipt.

So, though they carried their original identity, whose most pronounced mark was language, they were named and became Kenyan on the basis of documentation.

To date there are ‘Kenyans’ who only recognize their being Kenyan when they encounter government officials. Indeed, no Kenyan would declare that they are a Kenyan to a fellow Kenyan.

Kenyanness only becomes relevant when one plans to or leaves the country. Crossing borders, even within Eastern Africa, which should have free movement of people, immediately raises the specter of colonialism.

A Maasai on the border of Kenya and Tanzania has to declare their ‘nationality’ every time they cross the border, which in many places does not have a physical mark of the separation between the two countries.

Government officials, stuck in the analogue colonial mode, will hardly be interested in the fact that a Maasai on the Kenyan side of the border has immediate kin on the Tanzanian side.

What this immigration state of affairs reminds the ordinary citizen so forcefully of is the significance of belonging.

Though all Kenyans have a natural ‘belonging’, because they are born in a home and a community, thus, are tied to relatives and neighbours by blood and habitat, they also ‘belong’ to the nation-state of Kenya by law.

That law binds us in many ways and obliges Kenyans to pay taxes, serve the government when needed to do so, wherever in the republic of Kenya and beyond. It is also the root of the imagined Kenyan culture, the one that enables us to think of ourselves as one in the collective.

However, in the recent past that sense of oneness, of belonging together, of identifying as Kenyans has come under severe attack.

The fact that we even have an institution that is meant to police our cohesion and integration testifies to the difficulties of formatting a nation-state out of the diverse communities that make up this country.

Sixty years since the end of colonialism, Kenyans seem to be unsure of where independence has been and is taking them. Although politicians declaim our uhuru, madaraka and utawala wa mwafrika, Kenyans struggle to say what it is that makes them distinct as a nation-state.

Is it the flag or the identity card, or the birth certificate? Sometimes back some government functionaries mooted the idea of a national dress. Fine, just don’t wear such to parliament. Who are we, really, culturally?

The country appears to be severely assailed by corruption, which manifests itself in many forms and places. How can Kenyan institutions proudly display the words, ‘This is a Corruption-free Zone?’ Why, in the first place, would someone wish to declare that they are fraudsters? In which society is dishonesty normalised?

Every year the Auditor-General’s report reads like a manual on the art of misspending or, as Kenyans would say, eating public money. Indeed, government officers of all ranks bemoan the loss of public resources to embezzlement. By who, one may ask. By some ‘unseen, unknown, shadowy, sleazy government officers’, in cahoots with corruption networks.

The debauchery of Kenyans is such that even when it is reported that hundreds of people died in what was suspected to be the work of a sect; a cult that should have been under the monitoring of public officers, such news doesn’t really shock the national collective mind. There is yet to be moral anger at the Shakahola deaths.

Why? Because our history is replete with killings that have never been properly investigated and resolved. No one has ever been held accountable for mass murders in the past, beginning with the Mau Mau killings. No. Wait. The King of the United Kingdom almost apologised for that blot on the history of Kenya.

Maybe, just maybe, we might get someone, on behalf of the government of Kenya, saying sorry to the victims, families and friends of the thousands of Kenyans who live with the wounds of the Wagalla massacre, Likoni clashes, the 1992 clashes etc. The longer it takes to acknowledge these sins of the past, the more the spirit of Kenyanness is eroded.

However, nothing is more damaging to the sense of collective than the impoverishment of millions of Kenyans. Poor people cannot think about what it is that makes us Kenyans. Hungry people only seek to appease the spirits of the stomach every day.

They search for morsels for their dependents all day long and will develop serious resentment against their neighbors who appear a little better off than themselves. Unemployed youth will sneer at any suggestion that they are ‘future leaders’ of a country that doesn’t seem to understand their predicament.

Those street children who have never known the warmth of a home and a bed, how can we call them Kenyans anymore?

Religious people claim that the wages of sin is death? What will the nation-state and Kenyans earn from the abandonment of millions of other Kenyans? Why are more and more Kenyans becoming wretched? What shall a nation gain by having so many wretched souls? How did a God-fearing end up ignoring that fundamental decree to love thy neighbor as thyself? This is a country where the poor and the rich swear by their African neighborliness, spirit of togetherness, Ubuntu, and such lofty ideals. Yet, every day the media reports cases of abandoned elderly people, young men killing their mothers over a plate of ugali, clergy defrauding their congregants, investors swindling their customers etc.

Moral decay

How did we end up in this state of moral decay? What inertia is this that has disabled Kenyans such that they can analyze so acutely and proffer solutions and never just implement them? For instance, for how long did Kenyans know that El Nino will arrive on these shores and will definitely cause destruction and death? Why are politicians arguing about money to address this natural disaster?

What is there to argue about when people have died, property has been swept downstream, families have been displaced and don’t know when they will resettle, people stay all day and sleep hungry, have no potable water and live in fear of diseases and wild animals?

There is no culture anywhere in the world that endorses the kind of disengagement with the affairs of the society. Why have Kenyans naturalised the spirit of not caring and internalised ubinafsi? Do we need a regeneration of the spirit of the nation?

The spirit that built harambee schools, community clinics, roads, houses for the aged, paved rural roads, cared for the widowed, planted and harvested for neighbors, disciplined the neighbors’ child as if it was one’s own etc. Probably we do.

- The writer teaches at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]