Tradition, Tribe, and State in Kenya: The Mijikenda Union, 1945–1980

Abstract

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Baseline review and ecosystem services assessment of the Tana River Basin, Kenya

“…The term Mijikenda reflects the brief coming together in the early 1940s of nine separate but related tribes: Digo, Duruma, Giriama, Rabai, Ribe, Kambe, Jubana, Choni, and Kauma (Allen et al 1983). While the 'union' of these nine tribes had nearly collapsed by the late 1940s, the union was not formally dissolved until 1980 (Willis and Gona 2013). By this time, nevertheless, the term was well integrated into common usage and now widely refers to a group of people in the coastal Kenya region who share a common identity.…”

Beyond citizen and subject: New perspectives on political thought, “tribe,” and “indirect rule” in Africa

“…Ethnicity could be called upon by African elites in places where class consciousness was weak, it could serve as a moral community in times of crisis, or to combat the social dislocation wrought by urbanisation and labour migration (Vail, ). As Willis and Gona rightly note, however, this did not account for the popularity of ethnic and “tribal” identity in day‐to‐day life, unmoored from historical events and processes (Willis & Gona, ). Moreover, Vail continued to offer an essentially Namierite account, in which African elite and bourgeois interests underpinned the creation of “tribe”, ignoring its ubiquity as a popular discourse and a constituent part of lived experience in Africa (Lentz, ; Lentz & Nugent, ).…”

“…With “tradition” perceived as defining African society—custom and kinship came to be identified as the delimiting factors of African political agency—denying “tribal” people's entry into the realm of modern individualist civil society. Conversely, this discourse was used by Africans themselves to “evade or subvert the demands of officials” and, crucially, to imagine an alternative set of political futures (Willis & Gona, ). However, has the ongoing focus of scholars on the intellectually dyadic nature of the relationship between the colonial state and “tribe” blinded them to the range of political futures this implies?…”

When did the Luyia (or any other group) become a tribe?

“…Unlike Gusii, Kikuyu, or even the constituent Logoli or Bukusu within the Luyia project, whose cultural entrepreneurs who drew their constituents in direct descent from a mythic founding father, NKCA writers detached the name of this new ethnic identity from lineage or ancestry and instead privileged a horizontal drawing together of disparate, autonomous clans into one discursive and political space. Like the later naming of the confederate Mijikenda, literally translated as the "nine towns" or "nine homesteads", or the Kalenjin, who literally called to each other by naming themselves "I say to you", the naming of the "Luyia" reflected the self-conscious patriotic work of ethnic entrepreneurs in eastern Africa (Peterson and Macola 2008;Lynch 2011;Willis and Gona 2013).…”

“…Yet the framework of the "invention of tradition" fails to account for how these political thinkers fashioned an ethnic project without a common stock of historical myths and without a founding father from whom to imagine a patria. Unlike the more maximal cultural projects of the Luo, Kikuyu and the Haya farther afield, or even the more federalist projects of the Mijikenda and the Kalenjin, the "invention" of Luyia ethnic architects was not of a unified traditional past but rather of a corporate present and a common future (Cohen and Odhiambo 1989;Willis 1992Willis , 1993Spear and Waller 1993;Berman 1998;Bravman 1998;Ogot 2001;Peterson 2004a;Carotenuto 2006;Lynch 2011;Willis and Gona 2013). In the comparative politics of patriotism in colonial Kenya, ethnicity offered a historically contingent and politically viable form of community building (Lonsdale 2008).…”