"Tribe" and Kenyan Conflict

The AfricaFocus Bulletin, edited by William Minter, just recirculated a paper from the Africa Policy Information Center, written ten years ago, called "Talking about 'Tribe." Tragic to note how little the discourse has changed since then, as international media rolls out the same fossilized steereotypes in their coverage of Kenya.

Introductory comments by co-author of the paper, Chris Lowe:

Kenya's recent violence is occurring in a post-colonial multi-ethnic state, in a context of electoral ethnic mobilizations to contest for state power conducted with print and broadcast media, political party symbols and events, and so on. Related political and patronage ties are shaped by deep, modern, market-based economic inequalities and forms of poverty.

None of these conditions remotely resemble those of pre-colonial ethnic and national identities (my note: i.e. 'tribes') in the area that the British created as Kenya, which were quite varied due to a great diversity of ways of life and forms of social and political organization. All of them have strong analogies in industrial-era ethnic politics and conflict around the globe.

And the Editor's Note (by William Minter):

The Kenyan election, wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times in his December 31 dispatch from Nairobi, "seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem." Gettleman was not exceptional among those covering the post-election violence in his stress on "tribe." But his terminology was unusually explicit in revealing the assumption that such divisions are rooted in unchanging and presumably primitive identities.

In his blog the same day, African historian P. T. Zeleza countered that such divisions are neither peculiar to Africa nor rooted in "ancient hatreds." Rather, he noted, they are based on uneven regional development in both the colonial and post-colonial periods, followed, at intervals, by the political mobilization by elites of ethnic divisions.

Another AfricaFocus Bulletin sent out today contains excerpts from Zeleza's commentary and other reflections and calls for action to avert further violence in Kenya. But the pattern of oversimplifying African conflicts to "tribe" is pervasive and long-standing. Of course, changing the terminology will not solve conflicts, whatever their roots. But many analysts have long argued that "tribe" is particularly pernicious in diverting attention from the structural and immediate causes of violence by attributing it to
supposedly immutable and irrational divisions.