Kenya: Identity of A Nation
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (1 November 2007)
ISBN-10: 0980258790
ISBN-13: 9780980258790
Chapter Seven:
Ethnic Conflicts in Kenya: A Nation Divided
ALTHOUGH Kenya has been spared the agony Rwanda went through during the 1994 genocide which amounted to ethnic cleansing, and even what neighbouring Uganda experienced through the years especially in the northern part of the country which was devastated by violence that was partly caused by ethnic rivalries, there is no question that it also has had its share of bloodshed caused by ethnic conflicts.
In fact, Kenya has witnessed some of the worst forms of violence in East Africa in contemporary times.
The bloodiest conflicts took place in the 1990s between different ethnic groups and, in many cases, the violence was politically motivated, ignited and fuelled by unscrupulous politicians.
But the violence was also sparked by pure hatred and xenophobic fear among some people, especially in the Coast and Rift Valley Provinces, who resented members of other tribes from other parts of Kenya who had moved into and settled in those regions.
Many of the “outsiders” or “foreigners” who were attacked had lived there for years. And a very large number of them were also born in those provinces, the only place they knew as home.
They also, of course, had the right to live there as Kenyans themselves. But that is not how the indigenous people saw them. They saw them as “strangers,” “foreigners,” “outsiders,” and as “invaders” who had gone there to displace the “rightful” owners of the land and were not welcome. Anything that could be done to expel them - had to be done. And that included killing them. It became an orgy of killings.
It was one of the most tragic chapters in Kenya's history. And what happened then continues to haunt the nation today, as it continues its precarious existence simply because the leaders themselves - not all but a significant number of them - show that they are no more concerned about ending tribal rivalries than an ordinary person is; a person who is motivated by ethnic hatred towards fellow Kenyans for no other reason than that they don't belong to his or her tribe.
A large number of leaders are tribalist, favouring members of their own tribes. And they exploit ethnic and regional differences and rivalries in their quest for power and to perpetuate themselves in office. That is what happened in the 1990s. And it could happened again.
Back in the early 1990s, the ruling party KANU dominated by the Kalenjin from the Rift Valley Province – under the leadership of President Danie arap Moi who was a Kalenjin himself – played a major role in igniting the violence between different ethnic groups which almost tore the country apart in order to consolidate its position and stay in power. The result was bloodshed the country had never seen since Mau Mau.
At least 3,000 people were killed or severely wounded in the Rift Valley Province alone in 1992.
The primary target were the Kikuyu and other “foreigners” - Kenyans from other provinces - who had settled in the Rift Valley Province. The Kikuyu, who had moved and settled there in large numbers, suffered the most.
The attacks were carried out by the Kalenjin, members of President Moi's ethnic group which is dominant in the region. And nothing was done to the perpetrators of this violence.
Only a few years later before the presidential election in 1997, the Coast Province was the scene of the same kind of violence. The people who were killed were mostly “outsiders” who came from other parts of Kenya and settled in the Coast Province.
Leaflets written in Kiswahili were distributed in the region urging the indigenous people to drive out the “invaders” from other provinces. According to the International Herald Tribune, 18 August 1997, some of the leaflets stated: “The time has come for us original inhabitants of the coast to claim what is rightfully ours. We must remove these invaders from our land.”
The people who were attacked came from the interior. They were mostly Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kamba and others who had settled in the Coast Province. One witness in Mombasa, Edmund Kwena, was quoted by the International Herald Tribune saying a filling station was attacked and a pump set on fire.
He also said he saw scores of buildings torched on 17 August 1997, four days after the violence erupted in the Coast Province. He went on to say: “I personally counted up to 100 kiosks completely burned down. Dozens of houses were also set on fire in the Diani area, a popular tourist area south of Mombasa.”
The preceding statements are cited in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria (pp. 120 - 121), a comparative study.
The ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) under President Moi - which was dominated by the Kalenjin and their allies who were also mainly members of smaller tribes like the Kalenjin themselves - was accused of instigating the violence. The main target were members of tribes opposed to Moi's despotic rule. These were mostly Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kamba and others.
The attacks were reminiscent of what had taken place in other African counties where members of tribes who were not considered to be original inhabitants of the regions they had migrated to were killed or expelled from those regions where many of them had lived for decades.
The attacks in the Rift Valley and Coast Provinces in Kenya and the inflammatory language used by the instigators of this kind of violence to inflame passions among the indigenous people in those provinces had striking similarities to what happened in Nigeria in the sixties and in Zaire in the early nineties:
The language had striking parallels to what Northern Nigerian leaders said about the Igbos who had settled in their region. As Representative Mallam Mukhtar Bello stated in the Northern House of Assembly during the February-March 1964 session just two years before the massacre of the Igbos in that region:
"'I would like to say something very important that the Minister should take my appeal to the Federal Government (controlled by Northerners) about the Igbos....I wish the number of these Igbos be reduced....There are too many of them in the North. They are just like sardines and I think they are just too dangerous to the Region.'
The rest of the representatives in the Northern Regional Assembly expressed the same sentiment, including the Northern Premier himself, Sir Ahmadu Bello.
This hostility exploded into violence almost exactly two years later against the Igbos who had settled in the Northern Region. Most of them had lived there for decades.
And almost exactly 30 years later, the same thing happened in the Coast Province of Kenya against the people who came from the interior; and in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1993 when President Mobutu Sese Seko employed the same tactic against his opponents, igniting tribal violence which led to the massacre of thousands of people from Kasai Province who had settled in Shaba Province (formerly Katanga Province).
They also had lived there for decades, and their home province, Kasai, was also the home region of Mobutu's most powerful and influential rival, Etienne Tshisekedi.
Like the Igbos in Northern Nigeria, and the Kikuyu, the Luo, the Luhya, the Kamba and members of other tribes from inland who had settled in Kenya's Coast Province, the people from Kasai Province were also expelled en masse from Shaba Province.
And in all three cases, murder was the primary weapon used to facilitate the expulsion of these 'outsiders' and 'invaders.'" - (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria (Huntington, New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.,), p. 120; the expulsion of Igbos from Northern Nigeria also cited in Africa Contemporary Record (London, 1969), p. 664).
Kenyan newspapers were quick to report the violence in the Coast Province and stated that the attacks in that region appeared to be similar to those which took place in the Rift Valley Province before and after the general election in 1992.
There was unmistakable evidence of ethnic hostility which ignited and fuelled the violence. At least 1,500 Kikuyus and members of other tribes – but mostly Kikuyus - who had settled in the Rift Valley province were killed. Their property was also destroyed. As Gibson Kuria, a renowned human rights lawyer who was active in the movement for constitutional reforms, stated:
"This looks too much like 1992. The violence is aimed at certain ethnic communities, the government response has been lukewarm, and the violence we're seeing has had the same kind of brutality."- (Quoted by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria, ibid., p. 121; also, cited by G. Mwakikagile, “Explosion of Violence in Kenya Stirs Fears of Electoral Mayhem,” in the International Herald Tribune, 21 August 1997, p. 6).
When the attacks were launched, no one knew what the outcome would be. There were tens of thousands of Kikuyus, Luos, Kambas, Merus, Luhyas and members of other inland tribes who had lived in the Coast Province for decades and knew no other place as home. They were well-established in the region and no one would have expected them to pack up and leave just like that. And it seemed that the majority of them were going to stay. But that is not what happened in many cases.
Marauding gangs of between 200 and 500 indigenous people, native to the Coast, attacked these “foreigners” and “invaders” indiscriminately, determined to force them to go back where they came from. And they succeeded in driving them out of many areas.
They used all kinds of weapons including guns, clubs with nails, machetes, and bows and arrows. They also used arson as a major weapon. According to the International Herald Tribune:
"They burned homes and businesses and hacked off people's limbs....Signs of tension are everywhere. Trucks bounce along, stuffed with fleeing families' belongings (going back upcountry)." - (cited by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria, p. 121).
The government denied involvement but there was incontrovertible evidence showing that it was indeed behind the violence.
In fact, some of the irrefutable evidence came from the government itself and its ruling party officials based on what they said in public on different occasions before this politically motivated ethnic violence - fuelled by xenophobia - erupted. Even the police, to fool and impress the public, arrested one KANU activist involved in the violence – yet did nothing to stop it:
"Thus far, police have arrested at least one KANU activist in connection with the unrest....
In recent months several ruling party politicians have exhorted indigenous Mombasans to force outside groups back up country." - (International Herald Tribune, and Godfrey Mwakikagile, ibid.).
The fears opponents of Moi's regime had expressed were now justified. They accused the ruling party, KANU, of using violence to consolidate the president's position just before the general election and burnish his image in the Coast Province by expelling from the region members of ethnic groups such as the Kikuyu and Luo opposed to his tribalistic and autocratic rule. As Richard Leakey, a Kenyan of British origin born in Kenya who was one of Moi's most vocal critics, bluntly stated:
"There is no doubt that there is a political agenda in scaring the hell out of the upcountry people." - (Quoted by the International Herald Tribune, 21 August 1997, p. 6, and by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria, op. cit, p. 122).
And the violence continued. At the Likoni Catholic Church, about 3,000 people from upcountry who were members of the Kikuyu, Kamba, Luo and other tribes, filled the compound. They brought with them all their possessions or whatever they could carry or get the chance to take, with their enemies in hot pursuit.
It was a gruesome sight. They had been slashed with machetes, shot or severely beaten by some of the members of the Coastal tribes.
One of the victims was Jeremiah Mwindi Muli, 38 years old, and he had a harrowing tale of what happened to him.
He was returning home one morning from a nearby shop when he was attacked. About 20 young men armed with guns, clubs and machetes confronted him in an alley. They asked him for some money. Then they asked him what tribe he was. He told them he was a Kamba. And they attacked him.
He ran but they caught up with him and slashed him on both shoulders and on his upper right arm. His arm was paralysed from the attack.
After he returned to his house, everything was gone. He and his wife, Kanini, had two sons, one 5 years old, and the other one, only 18 months. Now they had nothing, not even clothes except the ones they had on:
"They even took our spoons. I'm poor and displaced, and I've lost all my possessions. I don't know how I'll start again." - (Quoted, ibid.).
The violence triggered an exodus never witnessed in the country's history on such a scale:
"Residents estimated that at least 40,000 of the total population of 60,000 had left the Kwale district since the start of ethnic attacks by gangs on August 13.
Throughout the night, men, women and children clutching a few belongings left homes and walked to bus and railway stations." - (International Herald Tribune, 30 August 1997, cited by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria, ibid., p. 123).
That was from one area alone. People from the hinterland had settled all over the Coast Province, and there was no place in the region where they felt safe.
Tens of thousands of other upcountry people fled from all over the Coast province within the same week of the attacks and in subsequent days, vowing never to return. It was one of the saddest chapters in the nation's history.
The exodus was reminiscent of what happened to the Igbos when they fled from Northern Nigeria and returned to their home region in Eastern Nigeria after they were attacked and tens of thousands of their compatriots were massacred in the North in 1966. At least 50,000 were killed in a few weeks.
Kenya in the 1990s was divided along ethnic lines as much as Nigeria was in the late sixties in terms of violence; the difference was in the magnitude of the violence – it was worse in Nigeria, and more people were killed there. But the hostility was the same, nonetheless. And the same problem exists in both countries today as much as it does in most African countries.
In Kenya, the outcome of the December 1997 presidential election was not surprising. Moi won by playing the ethnic card. As one western diplomat said about Moi's victory and support for his ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) by small tribes:
"That's not surprising when you consider that KANU is an alliance of small tribes whose main priority is preventing the Luos or the Kikuyus from taking power." - (Quoted by The Christian Science Monitor, 6 January 1998, p. 6, and Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria, ibid., p. 137).
Before Moi became president and filled the ruling party with members of his tribe, the Kalenjin, and of other small tribes allied with the Kalenjin, KANU was dominated by the Kikuyu under the leadership of their patriarch Jomo Kenyatta.
Other tribes resented that and were determined it would never happen again. It may not have, but the problem remained the same: power concentrated in the hands of one or a few ethnic groups, this time the Kalenjin and their allies, to the exclusion of the rest.
And even after the 1997 general election, the violence continued. The Kalenjin and their allies including the Maasai had won again, and consolidated their position, and felt that they could do anything they wanted to do at the expense of others – the Kikuyu, the Luo, the Luhya, the Kamba – without fear of retribution or legal sanctions since they were in power. They dominated and controlled the government under Moi, the most prominent and most powerful Kalenjin in the history of that tribe in modern times.
And they turned their home region, the Rift Valley Province, into a combat zone for ethnic cleansing.
The fighting, and killings, had already been going on in the Rift Valley Province even before the election and during the same time the violence was also going on in the Coast Province against non-indigenes. In fact, it happened even earlier.
Thousands of people who were displaced in 1991 during the ethnic attacks against the Kikuyu and others had neither returned nor received any help from Moi's government.
The Rift Valley Province was forbidden territory for them, although it been their home before the violence in the early 1990s. The violence perpetrated against them was justified – by the Kalenjins and their allies – solely on the grounds that they were not Kalenjin or native to the region, and did not support President Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin.
Three weeks after Moi was sworn in as president in January 1998, the violence continued to take its toll:
"Raiders armed with automatic rifles, bows and arrows, and spears have killed 22 more people in central Kenya, police said yesterday (January 27, 1998), raising the death toll in politically motivated violence this month to 77.
The latest violence broke out near the farming town of Njoro, where assailants have killed 22 people since Sunday (January 25), police spokesman Peter Kimathi said. 23 people were wounded....
The attacks apparently are aimed at driving Kenya's biggest tribe, the Kikuyu, off their land in the Rift Valley Province because they voted against President Daniel arap Moi's Kenya African National Union party in the December 29 – 30 elections.
Earlier this month, two of Moi's cabinet ministers openly threatened Kikuyu residents of the province in speeches at a rally of the Kenya African National Union party to celebrate their electoral victory.
Observers of the latest attack say the assailants were members of the Kalenjin group of tribes, which generally support Moi." - (The Boston Globe, 28 January 1998, and Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria, ibid., p. 138).
In 1992 and 1993, similar violence in the Rift Valley Province wreaked havoc on an unprecedented scale. About 2,000 people were killed, and 300,000 displaced. Most of them were Kikuyus.
What happened then is not just history. It is a perennial problem in terms of ethnic relations.
Different tribes still don't trust each other. They don't even like each other. Some do, some don't, as individuals. But as ethnic groups, the chasm runs deep. And nothing has been done to close it.
The ethnic violence in Kenya in the 1990s may be a thing of the past, but it is very much a part of the present. Ethnic tensions are an enduring phenomenon in Kenyan national life. And they erupted into violence a decade ago.
It happened then, and it could happen again. It is up to the people and the leaders to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
Tanzania is the only country in the region, if not on the entire continent, that has virtually conquered tribalism and racism. Even many foreigners who have been to Tanzania and other African countries have noticed that.
One of them was Keith B. Richburg, a black American journalist who was the bureau chief of The Washington Post in Nairobi for three years. As he states in his book – whose candour has inflamed passions among many people, especially black Americans and Africans – Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa:
"Moi became more thorough in his consolidation of power, placing loyal tribesmen in key government posts and cracking down hard on his perceived enemies within....
Even in a relatively modern state like Kenya, tribal animosities bubble just an inch beneath the surface.
The Kikuyu are the largest tribe and until Moi took over, had been at the forefront of the country's independence struggles and its early postcolonial politics. Jomo Kenyatta was a Kikuyu, and he was by all accounts a particularly harsh autocrat, a tribal chieftain of the first order who believed it was the Kikuyu's natural right to rule.
Many Kenyans, non-Kikuyu, are deathly fearful of another Kikuyu presidency (although they later voted for Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, to succeed Moi), and Moi has managed to tap into that fear and present himself as the only alternative. Moi has likewise been willing to allow more than a few tribal eruptions to make his point to Kenya and the world – that he alone represents stability for Kenya, that without him the country becomes just another African tribal killing zone....
If there was one thing I learned traveling around Africa, it was that the tribe remains the defining feature of almost every African society. Old tribal mistrusts and stereotypes linger, and the potential for a violent implosion is never very far from the surface.
Even in the supposedly more sophisticated or developed countries like Kenya, thirty years of independence and “nation building” had still failed to create any real sense of national identity that could transcend the tribe.
In Kenya, the Kikuyu still think the Luo are inferior and that they, the Kikuyu, have the right to rule. The Luo don't trust the Kikuyu, who they think look down on them. And both tribes look down on the Luhya. It goes on and on.
In Kenya, I also saw the devastating effects of what can happen when politicians, like Danie arap Moi and his cronies, are willing to play the “tribal card” and stoke the flames of ethnic animosity for political advantage.
I walked through the burned-out town of Enosupukio, after it was raided by Masai warriors driving out (the) Kikuyu who they believed had settled on traditional Masai grazing land. It looked like a war zone after a major battle, which, in a way, I suppose it was.
Not a single house or shop was left standing. Even two churches were stripped of everything except a few pews. And when I spoke to the Kikuyu refugees who had fled the town, they told me how the Masai who had once been their neighbors suddenly swooped down on the town with guns and machetes and spears.
One woman named Loyce Majiru told me how she had to flee with her nine children, and how she looked back and saw the body of a neighbor on the side of the road, naked, with his head chopped off.
And this was Kenya, a major tourist destination and a country long considered one of the more “stable” in Africa.
These things, though, are not too popular to discuss outside of Africa, particularly among the Africanists and Western academics for whom the very term “tribe” is anathema. The preferred term is “ethnic group” because it's considered less racially laden. But Africans themselves talk of their “tribes,” and they warn of the potential for tribal explosion....” - (Keith B. Richburg, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (New York: Basic Books), pp. 25 – 26, 104 -105).
Richburg goes on to talk about his experience in Kenya and other African countries and about the devastating impact of tribalism:
"I remember first arriving in Kenya and going to see one of those old colonial Brits, a man named Douglas – I never knew his first name – who worked in a cramped, dingy, smoke-stained office above the souvenir shop, surrounded by stacks and stacks of paper files in blue and pink and yellow cardboard folders.
He was a large man with white hair and a thick white mustache, and his suspenders pulled his pants so high up his waist they looked like they were touching his armpits. He was the real estate agent for the house I was renting, and I had to go to his office to drop off my check.
And I remember him sitting back imperiously with his hands over his wide stomach and appraising me, the newcomer to Africa, and then announcing, “You Americans don't know anything about the African. It's all tribes – tribes! And you don't understand that.” And I recall thinking at the time, how pompous this old man was, how utterly full of himself, bandying about that old worn cliche, tribalism, to explain Africa's ills.
I set out to prove old Douglas wrong. One of my earliest visits was to Tanzania, and there I found a country that had actually managed to purge itself of the evil of tribalism.
Under Julius Nyerere and his ruling socialists, the government was able to imbue a true sense of nationalism that transcended the country's natural ethnic divisions, among other things by vigorous campaigns to upgrade education and to make Swahili a truly national language.
Swahili today is widely spoken everywhere and has become the medium of instruction at Tanzanian universities, where I met a professor of Swahili studies who was busy translating the latest American computer program into Swahili.
Tanzania is one place that has succeeded in removing the linguistic barrier that separates so many of Africa's warring factions.
But after three years traveling the continent, I've found that Tanzania is the exception, not the rule. In Africa, as old man Douglas said, it is all about tribes.
Tribalism is what prompted tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutus to pick up machetes and hoes and panga knives and farming tools to bash in the skulls and sever the limbs of their Tutsi neighbors. Tribalism is why entire swaths of Kenya's scenic Rift Valley lie in scorched ruins, why Zulu gunmen in ski masks mow down Xhosa workers outside a factory gate in South Africa, and why thousands of hungry displaced Kasai huddle under plastic sheeting at a remote train station in eastern Zaire.
And it's tribalism under another name – clans, subclans, factions – that caused young men in Mogadishu to shell the city to oblivion and loot what was left of the rubble." - (K.B. Richburg, ibd., pp. 240 - 241).
There may even be a few other African countries, in fact very few if there are indeed any other, that are free from the scourge of tribalism and racism - in virulent form - like Tanzania is.
Botswana is one of them but probably because it is composed almost entirely of members of one ethnic group, the Tswana, besides the so-called Bushmen of the Kalahari desert many of whom may have an entirely different story to tell about their treatment at the hands of the dominant ethnic group.
In fact, there are many complaints which have been reported through the years – by “Bushmen” and their supporters – about the mistreatment of these indigenous people by the Tswana-dominated government. According to one report, “Rights Group Likens Bushmen Plight to Slavery,” by Voice of America (VOA) Africa News, 23 August 2007:
"The human rights group Survival International released a new report Thursday (23 August 2007) comparing the situation of Botswana's Bushmen to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The report is being issued to mark the UN Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.
The report says the same arguments used to defend slavery “bear a striking similarity” to those used to justify the eviction of the Bushmen from their ancestral lands.
The Gana and Gwi Bushmen were relocated from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 2002. Last December, they won a court case to return to their lands.
However, the government says only those named in the lawsuit, several hundred, should be allowed to return. Those who have returned accuse the government of preventing them from hunting, bringing in goats or using a nearby borehole for water.
Survival International Director Stephen Corry says there’s a worldwide prejudice against “tribal and indigenous people.”
“It’s very clear that there’s an attitude that they are somehow inferior, that they need to catch up, that they are uncivilized. They need to be civilized. And this is exactly the same thing which was said about the slave trade 200 years ago. I mean I think it is very easy to forget that the slave trade had a lot of defenders. People who were arguing that it benefited and helped civilize Africans. And that’s a direct quote from somebody in 1774,” he says.
Corry says that the government is using old arguments in its relocation of the Bushmen.
“The Botswanan government thinks their way of life is inferior. It sees them as hunter-gatherers, who should stop being hunter-gatherers and should, as it were, join the mainstream of society,” he says.
The Botswanan government has said the Bushmen would benefit by leaving game reserve by having better access to water, social and educational services.
A government document says a fund has been set up to provide training and help for Bushmen who want to start small businesses.
The government also says it wants to raise their standard of living and avoid land-use conflicts in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve as a result of agriculture and livestock.
Corry says the quality of life and health of the relocated Bushmen has deteriorated sharply. He says that you cannot use force to relocate indigenous people “without damaging them very severely.”
“Wherever there are tribal peoples still living in a way which they wish to live, the dominant societies often regard it as inferior and want to stop it, not least and generally because they want their land. That’s what it usually boils down to,” he says.
The Botswanan government, however, is quoted as saying it wants to bring the Bushmen into “the mainstream society without any detriment to their unique culture and tradition."
The country’s foreign minister was quoted in 2001 as saying, “It would be grossly irresponsible if we didn’t expose them to modern day culture.”"
If the “Bushmen” are indeed discriminated against and are seen as inferior to the Tswana, then that's tribalism and ethnic prejudice against these indigenous people.
So, Tanzania may still be the exception on the whole continent as a country that has virtually conquered tribalism. And in a few others also, such as Swaziland and may be even Namibia (that's may be), tribalism may not be a major problem like in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria and other countries across the continent, although there have been some complaints against the Ovambo, Namibia's dominant ethnic group.
Also, there have been some complaints now and then against the Chaga, the Haya, and the Nyakyusa (my tribe) in Tanzania who, for decades since independence, have had a disproportionately large number of jobs requiring high education.
But that is mainly for historical reasons. They had the opportunity to go school - members of other tribes did not have in large numbers - during colonial rule because they were mostly Christian and attended schools founded by missionaries in their home districts and regions; a point also underscored by President Nyerere when he heard some people complain that members of these three tribes had most of the jobs requiring high education. They wrongly attributed that to tribalism, a complaint Nyerere dismissed as unfounded.
There is no question that there are tribalists among them, including some in my tribe, the Nyakyusa; this is not a world of angels, but of human beings, with our own weaknesses and prejudices. And there will always be such people in all tribes. But, in spite of all that, tribalism still has never been a major problem in Tanzania. It has been effectively contained or neutralised in most areas of national life.
What Tanzania has achieved is not a miracle. Others can do it.
In fact, one of the reasons - besides economic inequities among the member states of the East African Community (EAC) dominated by Kenya, and other factors - many Tanzanians were adamantly opposed to fast-tracking the process of forming an East African political federation was their well-founded fear that tribalism in neighbouring countries like Kenya would spread to Tanzania like cancer and threaten the peace and stability the country has enjoyed since independence, if the countries were to unite under one government.
Tanzanians, of all races, are just people like any other human beings. They are not angels. They did not come from another planet. They are not endowed with any special qualities other Africans – or any other people on planet Earth – don't have. If they can conquer, or effectively contain, tribalism and racism to the point where these twin evils are not a major problem in national life, there is no reason why Kenyans can't do it.
And why not the rest across the continent? As Julius Nyerere used to say about nation building, which includes fighting and eliminating tribalism and racism, “It can be done, play your part.”
Kenya: Identity of A Nation
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (1 November 2007)
ISBN-10: 0980258790
ISBN-13: 9780980258790