10 - Hegemonic Enterprises & Instrumentalities of Survival: Ethnicity and Democracy in Kenya

Summary

Now the concept of ‘social change’ is more than a mere umbrella for several parallel, probably somehow related changes in diverse aspects of social life; it denotes the systematic transformation of a particular society. But at what level do we set ‘society’? … It was much easier as late as the 1940s, to speak of local social systems like those of the Asante or the Luo as being societies [rather] than whole colonies like the Gold Coast or Kenya. (Peel, 1984: 142)

We all come from one womb, the common womb of one Kenya. The blood shed for our freedom has washed away the differences between that clan and this one. Today there is no Luo, Gikuyu, Kamba, Giriama, Luhya, Maasai, Meru, Kalenjin or Turkana. We are all children of one mother. Our mother is Kenya, the mother of all Kenya people.

(Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1983: 234-5)

Democracy for Africa?

Thinking about a possible African variant of democracy is sometimes reminiscent of the ‘discovery’ of the okapi by Sir Harry Johnston in central Africa a century ago. As Richard Sklar re-tells the story, the okapi was an animal resembling a giraffe, a deer and a zebra. It was unknown to the European zoologists of the time, but they were nevertheless reluctant to acknowledge its existence as a distinct genus (Sklar, 1996: 708-9). Likewise, the genealogies of liberal democracy in the West have been multiple, as have been the prescriptions for its attainment. Its historiography is of relevance to African discourses to underscore its peculiarity in the Atlantic tradition, as well as to assert the possibility of uniqueness in Africa (Ake, 1993). Alexis de Tocqueville early on observed its oddity even within the Atlantic world. Democracy, he observed, had been a truly revolutionary impulse in France, overthrowing the existing feudal-aristocratic order and setting up a whole new stratum of bourgeois class rule, whereas the contrary had happened in America, where democracy had been appropriated by the Republican Party for the pursuit of essentially conservative goals.