Ethnic Tensions
Kenya's many ethnic groups are generally characterized by distinct languages and thus have the same tendency as Europe's nationalities to unite politically and socially. As is seen in table 4.1, the Kikuyu are the largest of Kenya's ethnic groups and together with the closely related Embu and Meru make up 26 percent of the population. The other large groups are the Luo and Luhya in the west, the Kamba to the east of the Kikuyu, and the Kalenjin groups around the Rift Valley. (See map 2.) Most of these groups did not have unified governmental organizations traditionally, but they did have a strong consciousness of common ancestry.
Prior to the imposition of British rule, these ethnic groups both traded and fought with one another, just like the rest of the world's nations. The conflicts tended to be more pronounced with those immediately neighboring groups that were culturally and linguistically most
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distinct—the Kikuyus with the Maasai in central Kenya, the Luo with the Luhyas, and the Luhyas with the Kalenjin in the west. Colonialism both reinforced these conflicts and introduced new ones. The introduction of European agricultural settlement had made land a scarce commodity and intensified the competition around it. During the colonial period itself these tensions had united African ethnic groups against the Europeans. As independence approached so did the prospect of transferring European lands to new owners. Thus many of the old conflicts over access to territory were renewed—the Kikuyu against the less numerous Maasai and Kalenjin for the east of the Rift Valley "White Highlands" and the Luhya against the Kalenjin for the west.
New tensions also had developed over access to wage employment. The three largest groups—the Kikuyu, the Luo, and the Luhya—were also the disproportionate leaders in education and urban jobs and found themselves in entirely new competitive relationships. Because new migrants to the cities naturally looked to their relatives for help in finding housing and jobs and because social life takes place most easily in one's mother tongue, this competition readily assumed ethnic overtones.
The British consciously fostered conflicts among the colony's other
ethnic groups, following the old slogan of "divide and rule." In the 1920s they deprived Asians of rights in the name of protecting Africans. During the crucial period in the 1950s when mass political mobilization was taking place, the colonial government confined African political organizations to single districts, forcing most nationalist politicians to build from an ethnic base. (Tom Mboya, a Luo, escaped this trap by building a multiethnic following out of the labor movement in Nairobi, but he was the exception.)[12]
Finally, the white settlers saw their own economic interests as most threatened by the large and better-educated African groups, particularly the Kikuyu and to a lesser extent the Luo. Thus they helped to split the nationalist movement by fostering the formation of the Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) to protect the territorial interests of the minority groups. In this way the whites helped many of the precolonial lines of conflict to resurface at independence. The new wine of land hunger was poured into the old bottles of ethnic difference and given new bite. At a later point the competition for urban jobs and businesses would be mixed into another set of these bottles and produce another set of conflicts, this time between the Kikuyu, the Luo, and the Luhya. Economic and ethnic differences were intermingled to produce tensions whose shape and force could not be explained by either alone.
This then was the dangerous political situation that Jomo Kenyatta faced when he emerged from detention. Kenyan politics had become fractionated along ethnic lines, with his own Kikuyu united with the Luo in the Kenyan African National Union (KANU) and in tight competition with KADU for control of the government. Almost all the leading politicians had built their organizations on ethnic bases, so it would not have been easy for Kenyatta to command support in a way that cut across these lines. Furthermore, the intra-African class conflicts that did exist in Kenya at the time were simmering just below the surface among the Kikuyu but were weakly developed among the other ethnic groups. If Kenyatta had played to the disadvantaged, as radicals such as Oginga Odinga and Bildad Kaggia wanted him to, he would have secured the enthusiasm of the Kikuyu poor, antagonized the Kikuyu petty bourgeoisie, and split his own political base, but without being able to make significant inroads into the ethnic bases of the politicians with whom he was competing. If Kenyatta had gone this route, he probably would have ended his career out of power.
Kenyatta instead chose to protect his own political base by taking a conservative line of intra-African class harmony and keeping the Kikuyu united by directing substantial benefits toward them without regard to need. Kenyatta argued that the bitter conflicts between Loyalists
and Mau Mau should simply be forgotten (with the former retaining the advantages in land they had gained). He said that there would be "no free things" distributed to the landless. The radicals ultimately rebelled against this neglect of their concerns, formed the Kenya People's Union (KPU), and were crushed in the "Little General Election" of 1966. The political shrewdness of Kenyatta's strategy was thus confirmed. In the process he reinforced a political system in which class conflicts were subordinated to ethnic ones while still fueling much of their heat.[13]
The result was a political system that was largely constructed out of patron-client networks. This had particularly unfortunate consequences for the interests of peasant farmers and the organizations that serve them. Since peasant needs are central to rural development, let us pause to explore the policy implications of patronage more fully.
The character of risk in agricultural systems in preindustrial society leads peasants to invest heavily in personal relationships as a hedge against adversity. Not only may close ties with social equals, such as relatives and neighbors, provide help when one experiences calamities such as drought or illness, bonds to one's social or economic superiors can result in personalized assistance as well. For these latter, unequal types of relationships, the recipient promises support in return for the help that he or she receives. This social dynamic lies at the root of the patron-client relationships that pervade poor countries and dominate most of their political processes.[14]
Patron-client politics mobilizes political resources along the lines of clientage networks (which need not be ascriptive but which in Kenya do in fact tend to follow kinship lines at the local level). By necessity these networks group together people of dissimilar interests; a patron must be advantaged in some area in order to have something to trade for the support of his clients. The resulting political processes are substantially different from those that result from associational groupings, which bring together those who share a common interest.[15] Associational politics leads to the direct representation of the common interests of large or powerful groups in society. If Kenyatta had followed the urging of the KANU radicals to emphasize the needs of Kenya's poor, particularly its peasants, he would have been building such an associational form of political organization. In contrast, patron-client politics masks the interests of the multitude, who are the clients, for they are represented in the system by advantaged patrons, whose personal interests are significantly different from those of their followers.
Associational politics tends to result in the creation of "public goods" for the most powerful groups—policies that will serve the common interests of the groups' memberships. Patron-client politics tends to focus on the creation of "private goods," discrete products and services that
can be disaggregated and distributed to individuals through clientage networks.[16] To the extent that patron-client systems produce any "public goods," such goods will tend to be those that will benefit the elite group of patrons and add to the personal wealth on which they can draw to maintain their clientage networks. Sometimes political systems are mixed; some groups will be incorporated through patron-client networks and others will be represented by associations. Such mixed systems generally work to the still greater disadvantage of small farmers. In systems like these, commercial and industrial interests, large farmers, and even sometimes urban workers have associations to press their interests, while the expression of peasant interests is dampened by patron-client networks. Kenya is such a mixed system. As a consequence, political demand for agricultural policies and programs meeting the common needs of small producers (public goods) is weakened, and emphasis has been placed instead on services that can be distributed to discrete groups of clients in return for their support (private goods).