Nairobi—Not long ago, the bosses of the newspaper I work for in Nairobi – The Daily Nation – urged its editors and journalists to avoid mentioning the tribal origins of their subjects. A federal election is underway in Kenya, and the purveyors of public discourse want their readers to vote as Kenyans rather than Luos, or Kambas, or Kisiis. It’s a tall order. There are over forty tribes of long standing in this country, and everybody belongs to one of them – speaks its language, tells its jokes, votes for its leader. This has been the case for much longer than Kenya has been a country. It isn’t immediately obvious to those of us used to the American version of tribal culture. For one thing, the only reservations in Kenya are for wild animals; and the fact that virtually everyone here belongs to a First Nation makes tribalism the rule instead of the exception. Except for the odd urban Masaai, no one sticks out.

This is arguably the biggest point of divergence in the colonial experience of Africa versus that of the Americas: In the end, the Africans got their continent back.

The original occupants of North America now comprise less than two percent of the population, a figure that increases by about a percent if you include “part-indigenous” peoples. We Europeans did a thorough job of stamping out the locals and engulfing the ones who survived.

Further south, the indigenous tribes of Latin America have found a middle ground. It’s true, on the one hand, that “pure” First Nations have here too been reduced to single-digit proportions (with notable exceptions, such as Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala, where they maintain about a fifty percent share of the population). But outside Argentina, which followed the northern pattern of wiping out the natives, whites are just as scarce. Instead of one or the other, centuries of prolific interbreeding between colonizers and colonized from Mexico to Chile, Venezuela to Panama, have led to hybrid populations that are sixty to ninety percent mestizo. Travel through the region and you can tell this at a glance.

By contrast, over ninety-nine percent of Africans have never been anything but. This too you can tell at a glance. South Africa, for obvious reasons, is the one country on the continent where whites make up more than one percent of the population. As for Kenya, only 30,000 white citizens are left in a country of over thirty million. There are a few more descendants of Arabic colonization, but together with the Europeans they still don’t add up to more than about a percent of the total population.

Walk through the streets of Nairobi, or Kisumu, or Mombasa, or any one of the thousands of villages and nomadic camps in the countryside, and every single person you’ll meet is subtly aware of it. The Masaai fit our preconceived notions the best, and many have learned to profit from their tourist-pleasing regalia – hand-dyed skirts and shawls, postcards and bows and arrows and impossibly pierced ears… but see that man driving his BMW into a car park? Kalenjin. That suited executive walking into the elevator? Kikuyu. The clerk at the superstore, your bartender, that group of students napping on the lawn at Nairobi University – Meru, Luhya, Samburu, tribal one and all.

Where mud huts and spears ought to be, we find skyscrapers and cell phones instead. How incongruous. Surely, these modern conveniences are the stuff of nations?

There are plenty of Kenyans, my employers among them, who think they should be. And to be fair, they’re responding to the tribe-on-tribe bloodbaths that have accompanied previous elections. Politicians here are adept at playing the tribal card, at pitting one group against another along ethnic lines; this is especially true outside the urban centers, where mud huts increasingly do take the place of skyscrapers and credulity replaces reason. It’s this kind of provocation that the nationalists want to avoid, not the customs and languages and musical traditions that breathe life into Kenya’s forty-two senses of self.

Both Kenya and the 21^st century it finds itself in are creatures of Western creation. The struggle for indigenous cultures to cohere and adapt to those creations, to make them their own, is being fought all over the world. What’s striking about the Kenyan experience is that rather than being too weak, cultures here may just be too strong.

Tags: international, kenya

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Posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 2:01 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.