Thread by @wmnjoya

For almost three years now, I've been struggling to answer this question: what is the relationship between race and ethnicity in Kenya?

THREAD.

Reason: I've found two things puzzling:

1. Uthamakistan often sounds like white supremacy

2. Public issues, especially tourism, education, police brutality and marginalization, are talked about with the same racist narratives as in the West.

One direct answer to my question is in Amy Chua's "World on fire," in which she argues that capitalism uses markets to appoint and favor a "market dominant minority" ethnic group, and then demands "democratic" elections to manage the inevitable resentment of the rest.

In 2017, I used that theory on my blog to explain why Americans didn't support Moi but loved Muigai. I argued, and I still think, that uthamakistan suits UK and US interests probably more than uthamakistanis themselves.
wandianjoya.com/blog/kenya-ele…

Although Chua's theory explains why the West appoints and supports market dominant minorities, it doesnt fully explain how we Africans relate to race and ethnicity. Worse, as @m_ogada reminds us, we don't want to talk about racism even though we live it

@m_ogada But I've just had an idea.💡

I've just remembered that in Caribbean, enslavement produced social distinctions based on degrees of blackness, categories like mulatto, quadroons and octaroons.

I think in Kenya, those "degrees of seperation" are performed by ethnicity.

@m_ogada In Kenya, our distance to wealth and power is decided by our ethnicity. The closest to power is Kikuyu, followed by Gema and the big five, and then the perceived geographical distance of your ethnic group from the center. Or Central, as we call it.

@m_ogada So the closer you are to border communities at Coast, Mandera, Pokot, Mt Elgon and Narok, the more documents you need to prove your Kenyanness when you apply for an ID. Our ethnicities work as our degrees of (un)worthiness. My friend called it the core, the center, the periphery.

@m_ogada Politicians dont want to dismantle this system. They negotiate within it. Not so much because they believe in it, but because they want wealth and power, and to get it, Americans have to support you, and this is the system the Americans want. They've been at this for centuries.

@m_ogada That's how Godec broke the 2017 resistance by using visas and travel bans to the West. No Kenyan politician aspiring for the presidency wants to cross the US embassy.

That is also why #BBI feels rather strange.

@m_ogada That's why
1, Ruto is doing this performance between supporting BBI and working against it.
2. few politicians with national ambitions strongly oppose BBI.
3. #BBI feels...I don't know how to say it ... like it concerns only 2 ethnic groups, and the rest are spoiling the party?

@m_ogada The rest of Kenya outside Kikuyu-land hates this system, but doesn't know what to do with it. I imagine that people feel outgunned and outnumbered. And it's understandable, because the state has taught us not to imagine anything else.

@m_ogada To imagine a Turkana woman or Digo man as president, or the capital moving outside Nairobi so that Nairobi remains the commercial center only, is not only difficult. It's not even allowed.

@m_ogada So we use ethnicity like Caribbeans used brown bags against the skin. When we ask "wewe ni kabila gani," we're not asking just about tribe, but "how close are you to power?" Or "how much can I mistreat you without the likelihood of crossing someone in power?"

@m_ogada "Wewe ni kabila gani" also means: "how useful are you to my economic and political ambitions?"

That is why to imagine a Kenya in which we have dethroned the Kenyattas requires a huge, HUGE leap in our imagination.

@m_ogada The Kenyattas are extremely unpopular. They know it, and the Americans LOVE it. It means the Kenyattas and their aspiring successors must do whatever Americans (aka corporations) want.

To get out of this, we must expand our historical knowledge and political consciousness.

@m_ogada 1. We need a revolution that is people driven, with literally NO politicians at the front of it, because the Anglo-Saxons have our politicians by the cahones.

2. We have to be deliberate in considering the role of the Americans and the British in our politics and economics.

@m_ogada 3. We have to WANT to do the intellectual and imaginative work, and the pirates and the pigs know it. That's why they keep changing our education, calling educated people names and the arts immoral, and telling us that thinking is useless unless it produces money or "solutions."

@m_ogada 4. We have to aware that every day, someone in government, church, media, at school or at work is telling us, in one way or another, not to think. And we have to defy them and still think and imagine another Kenya without this system of discrimination embedded in our minds.

END.