Soil, Work, Civilisation, and Citizenship in Kenya

Abstract

What does Kenya's crisis say to academic discussion about globalisation and the rise of local claims to ‘belong’, as autochthonous ‘sons of the soil’? The Kenya case supports the view that the changing relations between global pressures and states may exacerbate local conflicts that promote ethnocentric, exclusive concepts of belonging. But this article argues, further, for the importance of local concepts of self-worth and cultural value. Since Kenya's most ‘indigenous’ of peoples are the weakest, and almost all other Kenyans fairly recent immigrants, claims to territory are strategies justified by other arguments – to have improved the land, to have brought civilisation. Such managerial arguments do not help the poor, or women. Claims are evaluated according to an implicit moral hierarchy of ‘work’, and are best understood as expressions of local patriotism. These hold both generous and chauvinistic potential.

Notes

1. This article first appeared as a presentation to a conference on ‘La greffe de la démocratie: les paradoxes de la longue durée’ or ‘The Grafting of Democracy: Long-term Paradoxes’ held in Paris on 1 February 2008 – the inaugural meeting of ‘Rencontre européenne d'analyse des sociétés politiques’ or REASOPO. The presentation was there entitled ‘Autochthony, Work, Civilisation, and Citizenship in Kenya’, but autochthony is a word rarely used in English and never in Kenya. The claims of ‘sons of the soil’ and the politics of exclusion that are practised in the name of ‘autochthony’ are, however, a matter of widespread political and academic interest. My discussion owes much to the special issue on ‘Autochthony and the Crisis of Citizenship’ that the African Studies Review brought out in 2006 (Vol. 49, no. 2), and to Peter Geschiere who has shown me drafts of his Perils of Belonging – Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

2. Bloomfield, ‘Kenyan Gangs’.

3. Parsons, ‘Kibra is our Blood’.

4. Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism’.

5. For the start of my presumed Anglo-Luo descent see Genesis, ch. 10.

6. For which see Kopytoff, ‘The Internal African Frontier’; see also Kuba and Lentz, Land and the Politics of Belonging.

7. Churchill, My African Journey, 54; Blackburn, ‘The Okiek and their History’; Kenny, ‘Mirror in the Forest’; Distefano, ‘Hunters or Hunted?’

8. Lonsdale, ‘Contests of Time’, 233–36.

9. See especially, Kershaw, ‘The Land is the People’; more generally, Iliffe, Honour, 110–11.

10. Achieng’, ‘“Home away from Home”?’

11. Iliffe, The African Poor, 68–70 – drawing largely on the Kenya researches of Richard Waller; Anderson and Broch-Due (eds), The Poor are not Us.

12. Lonsdale, ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, 342; Otieno, ‘Recollections’.

13. Kanyinga, ‘Land Question’; Klopp, ‘Electoral Despotism’.

14. Wrong, ‘Who are the Kikuyu?’ For the Kikuyu ‘labour theory of value’ see Lonsdale, ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau’.

15. Médard, ‘Les conflits “ethniques” au Kenya’; Médard, ‘Dispositifs electoraux et nationalismes ethniques’. I am grateful to Dr Médard for her cautions against adopting local Kenyan ‘orientalisms’ (in conversation, Paris, 1 February 2008).

16. Furedi, The Mau Mau War; Kanogo, Squatters; Throup, Economic and Social Origins, chs 5 and 6.

17. Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM.

18. For the difficulties that women of resource caused to men of power see: White, The Comforts of Home; Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way; Folke Frederiksen, ‘African Women’; Thomas, Politics of the Womb; Kanogo, African Womanhood; Onyango, ‘Luo Women's Negotiation’.

19. Klopp, ‘Kenya's Internally Displaced’.

20. Kamanda, ‘Missions, Western Education’, 168.

21. Morrison, ‘Banished to the Political Wilderness?’; Atieno Odhiambo, ‘Hegemonic Enterprises’. For fishing, Mboya, Luo Kitgi gi Timbegi, 25–31 – a reference I owe to Derek Peterson.

22. Lynch, ‘Kenyan Politics and the Ethnic Factor’.

23. Salim ‘The Impact of Colonialism’; Hoorweg, Foeken and Obudho, Kenya Coast Handbook, especially part III and ch. 17; Oded, Islam & Politics.

24. Ogot, ‘The Construction of a National Culture’, 235.

25. The underlying theme of Iliffe, Africans.

26. As argued in Bayart, Gouvernement du monde, ch. 2.

27. Cooper, ‘What is the Concept of Globalization Good for?’

28. As argued (following Igor Kopytoff and Jan Vansina), in Lonsdale, ‘Globalization, Ethnicity, and Democracy’ and in Lonsdale, ‘Comparative Patriotisms’.

29. Quoted in The Economist, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’.