Most Kenyans blame political trickery for their present crisis of nationhood.

Outside observers condemn ‘ancient tribal rivalry'. British imperialism has also been criticised for inventing the now-indigenous art of divide and rule. All three criticisms are too simple.  Political trickery is universal; it does not always cause bloodshed.  Similarly, human beings have ever been taught specific, ethnic, notions of civilisation; but ‘tribal rivalry' is modern, not ancient.  And such rivalry can flourish in multi-ethnic states of any sort, not only in ex-British post-colonies. 

The guts of my argument are, then, that Kenya's crisis is modern, that it is attributable to historical patterns of interaction between ethnicity and the state, and that those patterns can be changed, given the necessary political will. 

Ethnicity, tribalism, and power

While all human beings enjoy different ethnic cultures we do not all hate ethnic others.  How then does the universal human distinction of ethnicity become ‘political tribalism', in which to hate others becomes a patriotic good? Why and when does the basis of humanity become the foundation of inhumanity? 

The answer seems to lie in the nature of the state.  All states concentrate power unequally.  That is what makes them states.  But for states to survive and prosper requires that most of their people accept that their unequal power is legitimate and for the common good.  That is clearly not true of Kenya today. 

No state is perfect.  But some are better than others in ensuring that their power is accountable and that citizens really are citizens-with equality both of opportunity to speak to power and of protection against its abuses. 

It is where power is abused, and where citizens have no means of redress, that power-holders and their closest allies are hated.  That is the problem in Kenya.

Public mistrust is most likely where favoured client groups are seen to be of different ethnic origin from those excluded from power.  In such circumstances the very idea of a common citizenship, or of a common public good, ceases to be imaginable.

Further, where state power becomes a private good, enjoyed only by a privileged few, it becomes subject to ever sharper competition.  The most brazen competitors bend the rules of the game, and where there are no rules clubs (or pangas) are trumps. 

My argument

How do these observations apply to Kenya?  My argument is that Kenya's ethnicities are not inherently hostile to each other.  There is no ‘ancient tribal rivalry'.  Such rivalry was not possible before the last century.  The colonial and post-colonial states made such rivalry likely, because that is the nature of states. 

But states do not make political tribalism inevitable. Constitutions can always be made to change the rules under which people compete for and exercise power, and are then held responsible. 

Kenya's state has often been reformed at past moments of crisis.  Kenya is in crisis again.  Where then is the pressure for reform? 

Precolonial ethnicity in ‘Kenya'

Before 1900 the area that became ‘Kenya' was stateless.  Its peoples' humanity, their ethnicity, was shaped by their subsistence-farming, herding, fishing, hunting, or some mixture of them all.  Their cultures celebrated the different sorts of labour that ensured well-being in very diverse natural environments. 

Such ethnic groups were not competing teams; they were not rival ‘tribes'.  Loyalties were smaller than that-patriarchal lineages, marriage alliances, age-groups, trading partnerships, client-clusters, and so on. 

What made ethnic groups self-conscious was their internal debates over how to win male and female honour within their always unequal social relations.  External tribal solidarity against strangers was non-existent. 

The calls of ‘atiriri' or ‘kalenjin'-‘I say to you'-were invitations to moral debate rather than to tribal war.  Ethnic groups traded and intermarried with each other because their economies were more often complementary than competitive. 

A relatively easy-but not always peaceful-inter-ethnicity was possible because no central authority existed, capable of distributing power unequally between such groups.  Sustained ‘tribal rivalry' could not exist in such decentralised, under-populated, conditions. 

The contradictions of the colonial state

It was European rivalry that imported the state.  The British assembled the new state with self-interested violence, as in all states.  But, like all states, the administration needed allies.  Allies have their own interests.  The colonial state had to mediate the contradictions between them-between Africans, Indians, and white settlers.

British officials allied with African leaders who they thought too weak to be rivals. Conversely, they tried at times to suppress the self-destructive excesses of their potentially overmighty subjects, the settlers.  The government was also nervous of Indian opinion, since India was central, first to the British empire-‘the jewel in the crown'-and then to the multi-racial commonwealth. 

The colonial state was authoritarian. It was not responsible to Kenyans. But it had to move with caution, changing its character with changing times.   

Crisis and reform in colonial Kenya

While Kenya was a conquest state, district commissioners had to ally with Africans they called chiefs where there had been none before.  Africans could pay tax mainly because Indian dukawallahs bought their produce and put cash into circulation.

White settlers found this intolerable.  Africans should work for them, not trade with Indians.  Initially London gave way to the settlers, the most powerful ethnic group.

Then, when the settlers threatened to take control of the state, after the First World War, the British government stepped in to stop them.  Why?  Because Indians and Africans, both valuable allies in the War, protested-the latter led by Harry Thuku.

The British resolved this crisis by creating a Kenya the settlers would find more difficult to seize.  Indians got the vote.  State power began to be decentralised when ‘Local Native Councils' were introduced in 1925, soon with elected members.

This was colonial Kenya's first constitutional reform, when the government was forced to curb the ambition of its loudest supporters and concede some of its opponents' demands. 

The British government tried to juggle its responsibilities to its various constituents.  Perhaps this was easier for the British than for independent Kenya's rulers, since the imperialists always knew that, one day, they would hand their power away. 

The independent state has no such intention.  Also, settlers were under one per cent of the population. Groups now seen to be privileged constitute ten or twenty per cent.  To reform Kenya in order to preserve it is now more difficult. 

Decolonisation and Mau Mau

The colonial government took two interesting steps towards decolonisation soon after the Second World War.  Both were intended to deprive the white settlers of some of their power (again) and make them co-operate with the majority of Kenyans.

First, in 1948, the government gave settlers their long-standing wish, an ‘unofficial majority' in the Legislative Council-but it was a multi-racial majority, not what the settlers wanted at all.  They could now defeat the government, but only if they carried Asian and African members with them.

The other British attempt to diminish white power was to set up the East African Common Services Organisation-since nobody could agree on an East African Federation-with a central legislative assembly elected on a formula that would soon see white settlers outnumbered by Africans and Asians.

These reforms attempted to avert a future crisis in which a rising African nationalism would clash with entrenched settler interests.  They were too little, too late.

Mau Mau arose largely because settlers were still the state's most favoured clients, with power not only to run their own affairs but also to ruin the lives of others-especially those of Kikuyu farm-squatters, who became the core of Mau Mau.

But the British reaction also has lessons for today.  To protect their most vocal supporters, the settlers, the British crushed Mau Mau with ferocity.  But they also made sure that neither settler nor African militancy could cause so much trouble in future.

While the Mau Mau war was horrible, economic and political reform was at the same time remarkable.  African Trade Unions were recognised; millions of pounds were invested in African agriculture; the first African elections were held.

One aim of these reforms was to reassure settlers that it was safe to be Kenyan, no longer a segregated group. The other was to give some Africans a self-interest that matched rather than competed with Asians and whites.

The British could then safely decolonise without conceding victory to Mau Mau.  Successful state reform generally rewards moderates while punishing militants.  So it was in Kenya. 

Colonial rule and tribalism

While one can show that the colonial state could be reformed in order to avoid the dangers of too much favouritism to privileged groups-and that, by and large, it failed-what about ‘divide and rule'?  The answer, again, is not simple.

Both settlers and Africans colonised the state and its facilities.  Where there had once been a fragmented mosaic of ethnic complementarity there arose a pyramid of profit and power. This had two centres-‘white'and black-and many neglected peripheries.

White settlers got one fifth of Kenya's high-potential farmland.  The British had, increasingly, to encourage African farming on the other eighty per cent, since settlers failed to provide enough tax revenue and blocked African opportunity.

So Kikuyuland became the second economic centre; home to twenty per cent of the population; close to the capital, Nairobi; cool and attractive to missionaries, with more schools than elsewhere. 

By geographical accident, therefore-not by British design-some Kikuyu got a head start in making money, essential for politics; and in acquiring modern managerial skill.  Most nationalisms start among those subjects who do best out of, and are most useful to, an alien regime; their frustrations are keenest, their opportunity the greatest. 

Other ethnic groups, not so well placed, made the most of what they had, often driven by a local patriotism inspired by vernacular, mission-translated, Bibles that told of an enslaved people who became a tribal nation. 

Chain-migrations out of pauper peripheries also led them, like the Scots or Irish throughout the empire, to colonise particular niches of employment, on the railway; on white farms and plantations; in domestic service; or in the police and army. 

Unequal opportunities for social mobility widened ethnic divisions.  Regional inequalities emerged amid the social changes made possible by colonialism. 

Britain did not, therefore, divide in order to rule.  British officials and employers did however help to harden Kenya's divisions by exploiting and stereotyping the ethnic distinctions that supposedly led to different rates of social change.

It would be more true to say the British tried-briefly, before they learned better-to divide Africans in order to decolonise a Kenya that would be safe for settlers.  It was a multi-national state that the nationalist government inherited. 

Independent Kenya and reform?

Independent Kenya has been reformed as often as colonial Kenya and for much the same reasons but with totally different failures and dangers.  The question is, can Kenya now do better, as surely it must?

Kenyatta received from the British a broken-backed state (as Kenyatta feared), with a majimbo constitution that would prevent Kenyatta (as the British and many Kenyans feared) from misusing his power for tribal advantage.  Majimbo did not last long.

That was because, in response to successive crises, Kenyan presidents have, in stark contrast to the colonial crisis-response, increasingly centralised power in their own person.  Since the late 1960s presidents have wielded more power, less open to challenge, than any colonial governor.

The crises have been real enough-the army mutiny in 1964; the Somali shifta war; the ideological splits that imported the Cold War into Kenya; the attempted coups of 1982; the collapse of Africa's terms of trade; and so on.

But crises have also been increasingly self-inflicted-the assassinations; the oathing of the house of Muumbi in 1969; the rise of kleptocratic office-holding; the arming of youthful militias to protect such misappropriated gains; punitive expeditions (a colonial revival) to intimidate the wrong sort of electors; and so on.

All these self-inflicted wounds have paralleled the widening gulf between the advantages of power and the perils of exclusion from it.  Every constitutional reform since 1964 has given the presidency more powers to ignore or manipulate parliament, to use the provincial administration as a partisan tool, to hire and fire judges or other holders of public offices of trust.

That electoral constituencies so often coincide with ethnic territory has inevitably linked this concentrated presidential power to coalitions of narrow ethnic advantage.  This is why the present crisis has, so predictably, burst upon Kenya.

Most Kenyans, especially the urban poor, know what must be done so that they can then get on with the normal inter-ethnicity of daily survival.  It is to disarm political tribalism by a de-concentration of state power.

The Yash Ghai commission showed how.  Power, for instance, could be shared between president and prime-minister.  All public offices of trust must have security of tenure, subject to independent scrutiny.  Local government must be restored-not with the power to discriminate against ‘stranger' Kenyans, but with enough authority to run local services efficiently. 

Effective local government would require the abolition of presidential control by means of the provincial administration.  Electoral constituencies must be de-linked from ethnic identity. Various electoral alternatives are on offer.  Parliament might then acquire a public will.

But who are the militants here who must be marginalised, the moderates who must be rewarded?  Today the militants hold power.  And why should Kenya's political classes render themselves accountable to real citizens, in preference to manipulating pretended kinsmen? 

Because without reform there may no longer be a Kenyan state to plunder.  To-day's political tribalism could in time slide into civil war.  Where then are the moderates with the sufficiently angry political will to create a new Kenya that would serve the legitimate needs of all rather than the unpatriotic ambitions of the few?

This article is adapted from an earlier one posted on the OpenDemocracy website.