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Pan-African Postcard
Loving each other won’t cure ‘negative ethnicity’
L. Muthoni Wanyeki
2010-02-04, Issue 468
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/61994
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Following the violence of 2007/8 in Kenya, a host of initiatives, purporting to address what is wrongfully termed ‘negative ethnicity’, came into being. Parliament proceeded to pass the Ethnic and Race Relations Act, which established the National Cohesion and Integration Commission. It also established a new select committee on equality, originally intended to address gender inequality, but which now also address inequality in terms of ethnicity. The executive established a ministry to address the long-standing underdevelopment of the north of Kenya. And the Law Reform Commission of Kenya is sitting on another proposed piece of legislation, referred back to it by Cabinet, on equality and equal opportunities.
Citizens too have a host of initiatives of their own. One of the most interesting is ‘Kikuyus for Change’, which seeks both to understand why the rest of Kenya ‘hates’ Gikuyus, using inter-ethnic dialogues, as well as why Gikuyus (or rather, the Gikuyu economic and political establishment) are so adamant about the need to hold onto power, using intra-ethnic dialogue.
It joins a previous initiative of the Kenyan south Asian community, Awaaz, which seeks to do the same two things through the production of a magazine on the history of Kenyan south Asians in the country. Meanwhile, the groundbreaking statistical and analytical work done by the Society for International Development (SID) on gender, income and regional inequalities continues to be followed through by the Ministry of Planning.
All of these initiatives are potentially useful and well meaning. All, however, fail to get to the heart of the problem. What is missing, I think, is a clear understanding of what equality and non-discrimination actually mean and how, from independence on, the equality provisions in our current constitution have failed to be realised by both the public and the private sectors.
What all of these initiatives do, with the possible exceptions of those by Awaaz and SID, is address so-called negative ethnicity from the perspective of whether or not we like each other. Not that that does not need to be done. Prejudices and stereotypes abound here: Gikuyus are greedy; Asians treat Africans like dirt and are, like the Gikuyus, too dominant in the economy; Luos are uncircumcised and thus unfit to rule; Luhyas are, as one Luhya politician infamously put it, ‘cooks and watchmen’; Masaais (and all pastoralists) need to get with the modernisation agenda and settle down; Somalis are uncivilised and violent; Europeans are racist and treat their pets better than their workers and so on.
All these are, of course, untrue generalizations. And any initiatives that could begin to unravel just how they have evolved into common and strongly held belief systems about each other, should be encouraged. Indeed, the Kenya Institute of Education should probably be ensuring that this is done nationally, through an expansion of the existing human-rights education component of the national curriculum.
But addressing prejudice and stereotypes will not resolve the problem. We simply cannot regulate how people feel about other people. What we can do, however, is regulate whether and how those feelings translate into actions; into discrimination in the public and private sectors on the basis of those prejudices and stereotypes. And Kenyans discriminate, daily and routinely as a matter of course, in the public and private sectors. Although we, of course, don’t call preferential treatment of our families, our community members discrimination.
How do we advertise? Who do we hire, then train and promote? Who do we contract from? Who do we want living in our properties? Who do we ‘facilitate’ when it comes to access to public services or performance of public functions? And so on. Whether consciously or not, this is discrimination. Whether we accept it or not, the long-term consequence of this is inequality – both in opportunities as well as results.
The problem is that this sort of discrimination is so absolutely normalised that it doesn’t even occur to most of those who experience it to challenge it and seek legal redress. And, even if they did, the legal remedies that exist are weak. Not for a lack of laws – apart from our constitution’s equality rights section, we have a plethora of legislation dealing with different grounds on which discrimination can occur (from gender to HIV status), as well as the different areas in which it does (from education to employment) – but because we’re not aware of either the laws or of how to invoke them in a manner that expeditiously resolves the immediate situation at hand.
What this means is two things. First, our daily, routine experiences of discrimination become bitter, individual anecdotes, shared usually within our families and broader communities. And second, as soon as we get the chance, we repeat the same behaviour, but this time in favour of our ‘own’. We are, after all, only informally remedying what we should have been able to remedy formally. Our expectation of being treated badly by others translates into our doing exactly the same thing. Whether we accept it or not, it is this that has led to the tensions that exist within the country and not whether we like one another or not.
What we need – apart from the strengthened equality and non-discrimination provisions that we expect in our new constitution – is comprehensive legislation that doesn’t just harmonise what already exists, but that goes far farther to establish a workable complaints body with the power to effect real remedies for aggrieved individuals and groups, including systemic remedies. Will the bill pending at the Law Reform Commission of Kenya do this for us? We need to make sure that it will.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* L. Muthoni Wanyeki is executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC).
*This article was first published in the East African on 31 January 2010.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
Readers' Comments
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The “Loving each other wont cure negative ethnicity” piece illuminates a number of issues vis a vis Kenya’s social, political and economic landscape, it however fails to confront head on the deeper problem simmering in the country. It is important not to wholly dismiss the ‘lets like each other’ processes as the writer terms them as not comprehending the larger inequality issues facing the country and instead adopting what appears to be a cosmetic response. An examination of post conflict contexts – Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Liberia to name a few will indicate that ‘lets love each other’ processes are a critical component of repairing and assuaging the psycho emotional landscape of a people (as a whole) who have had to face the realization that: to put it simply – we are ‘bad people’, we have the potential for killing, maiming and wanton destruction of property.
To argue that let us stick with what we know – which is ‘regulate’ equality and discrimination through commissions, offices of ombudsmen (while important) is to render our societies prisoners to detached legal systems that simply relegate human beings to numbers, statistics and test cases. It is also unwise in a context that is still volatile to place a lot of weight on ‘regulation’ via legal systems, which are based on a rights framework. While we recognize that they are useful as a minimum, they are not the panacea to transformation. Attempts to regulate Gender equity in Kenya and in most parts of the continent have produced little results via legal systems and so have those that have attempted to address land tenure systems except in contexts where radical approaches have been adopted and even then the fundamental economic principles on which they are based – winner takes all – render such processes a failure before they begin. The attempts to regulate corruption in Kenya through the corruption body – well we all know how that has turned out.
In my opinion there are three key questions that we should be asking instead. The first being, what purpose are these inter and intra ethnic dialogue’s serving in beginning a conversation that is a critical component for the effective functioning of any unit? These dialogues provide the ingredients for a framework within which inequality can be fully unpacked if we argue that it is currently not fully understood. To assume that years of propaganda building that have led to the embedding of ethnic stereotypes as a given in the Kenyan psyche is to underestimate the power of the state machinery.
Secondly, destabilizing the normalization of stereotypes is part of the answer to unfolding why inequality abounds. Hence the importance of conversations across the divide. In a context where ‘communities’ have been ghettoised in particular corners and where ethnicity is the currency, those generalisation’s are central to maintaining unequal competition for resources. So Luhya’s as cooks and watchmen can only negotiate for resources within that particular space: that normalization in a people’s mind, a law cannot regulate. Particularly when it is reinforced by ethnic kingpins and utilised as the currency with which to fight for state power – you are cooks and watchmen because we are not at the helm.
The third and which I believe is more critical to explore and particularly in understanding its implications for the future of the country, is why other ethnic groups do not feel the need to hold these dialogues(that is if none exist). How far and how long will the righteous anger be held onto and eventually transform into a sense of entitlement because, ‘we have been historically hard done by’. The mushrooming of such sentiments have been present in a context such as South Africa and unchecked present a much more dangerous problem.
Finally, the monolithic tribe that benefits from the system needs to be examined further. Not all Bagandan’s for instance, feel or have directly benefitted from Museveni being in power. The minute we position inequality as Them (tribe A) vs Us (tribe b,c,d) we miss the – ‘all pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others’ maxim. The class struggle lost in the ethnicity card. Our task should be to uncover the class issues in our society and that is the potential that these dialogues hold if pushed to their logical conclusion.
Awino Okech