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1 - Kenya’s Four Ages of Ethnicity

from Part I - Social Cohesion in Africa: Case Studies of Past and Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2019

By
John Lonsdale
Edited by
Hiroyuki Hino ,
Arnim Langer ,
John Lonsdale  and
Frances Stewart
Hiroyuki Hino
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina and the University of Cape Town
Arnim Langer
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
John Lonsdale
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Frances Stewart
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter argues that ethnicity is a universal human characteristic; it is an identity whose moral economy of mutual social relations causes internal dispute more continuously than external contexts cause interethnic competition. Ethnicities are mixed, shared, and subject to constant change in their own self-awareness and their inter-relations with others. The last two centuries of Kenya’s history illustrate this point. In the stateless, precolonial, past, different ways of taming the varied regional environment were the greatest influence on the nature of “ecological ethnicities” that shared ideas, took in each others’ economic migrants, and engaged in little “inter-tribal war”. Under colonial rule, access to scriptural literacy and arguments about how best to resist subjection caused much a sharper, patriotic, ethnic self-awareness. Regional inequalities in development, especially the triumph of agriculture over pastoralism, made ethnicity more competitive – a condition greatly emphasised when independence gave some Africans a centralised coercive power over others. Kenya has only recently adopted a devolved constitution that may defuse this often lethal competition but it is as yet too early to say.

Keywords

Moral ethnicityMoral economyAgrarian-educational revolutionPolitical tribalism
Type
Chapter
Information
From Divided Pasts to Cohesive Futures
Reflections on Africa
 , pp. 15 - 68
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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