The question ‘Where Do You Come From’ is never far from the introductions involving people who are strangers to each other. It is often an innocent statement; a search for an entry point into the social life that the meeting between the people will inaugurate; some kind of ‘I don’t know you, you don’t know me, so let’s set the agenda by stating our interests in this meeting.’ But these days, in many parts of the world, the answer to this question can be very dangerous. Revealing your identity can easily translate into a life versus death struggle.

Very often, throughout recent history, women and men have exploited differences to dehumanize others. Belonging to a different race or ethnicity or socio-economic; or being of a different religious or political conviction; or being originally from ‘elsewhere’ has always provided the identity tag that often triggers unimaginable consequences for those deemed different from the mainstream, the majority, or those in power. Prejudice and intolerance against those whose identity is different from the group that is interested in and defining that ‘other’ identity are common occurrences.

The marking of those who are different disguises itself as simple ethnic, racial or religious identification but which can quickly be used to profile the whole society. The kind of intolerance and violence that many Kenyans suffered in the wake of the disputed presidential elections in December 2007 may have surprised many Kenyans; although it surely shouldn’t have. Throughout our history as a country, Kenyans have always enjoyed a good laugh when a joke is made against members of another tribe. Jokes about Luos, Luhyas, Kikuyus, Waswahilis, Indians/Asians, Arabs or Europeans (Caucasians) abound in this country. It is a national pastime to know the latest joke about the thieving habits of a certain community, or the extravagance of another, or the meanness of another, etc. We never just stop for a moment to examine the hidden intentions of these jokes.

The stereotyping can, in the long run, become the only reference point or source of knowledge about the other people. In other words, the prejudice we hold against someone else can end up limiting our ability to know more about the stranger. Because we assume that members of tribe A or race B are secretive or manipulative, respectively, we see no reason why we should interact with them, know their language or appreciate what makes them different from us. We forget that just as they appear ‘different’ to us, we are equally ‘different’ in their eyes!

How many times do we casually stand, stare or listen and wonder at how someone else is dressed (horrified that she or he could actually dress so differently from us)? Have you ever called someone else’s language ‘incomprehensible chatter’? Did you ever go to a dinner and get ‘horrified’ at what ‘those’ people were eating? These emotions and reactions are probably just right. But it is the way they constitute the archive to which we go back now and then in order to describe others (‘ooh, those people who walk naked’; ‘no, the Chinese speak an unintelligible language’; or ‘how can someone eat caterpillars?’) that may turn mere annoyance or irritation into something to use to hate others.

Many scholars on the subject of racism have argued that prejudice and the increase in intolerance of immigrants, visitors or strangers even as the world is changing in many ways is due to fear of the unknown. Arjun Appadurai has recently argued that the fear of those who we cannot easily relate to and who are generally small in number (in relation to the rest) but are likely to be successful (whichever way you define success) is a defining factor of intolerance in the world today (Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, 2006). Intolerance of a few can easily turn into killings like it happened in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, northern Uganda or Palestine. Genocide is real and it happens because of fairly small doses of fear and anger which overwhelm the capacity to see ourselves in the shared humanity with the others.

Ethnicity, race and religious differences today account for much of the polarization of identities and the fracturing of communities across the world. As people travel and information flows to the far corners of the world, in a time less than a second and to billions of people, ignorance of difference, ironically, spreads too. Democracy and globalization are touted as liberating but they have not helped the American right (and really many others) to understand that hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world are not ‘potential killers.’ The captain of England’s national team is being accused of racist slurs uttered in public. Palestinians continue to be strangers in their own land. Here in Kenya thousands of families live in destitution whilst the land from which they formerly earned a living lies idle because their neighbours forcibly removed them from it. Yet Kenya is a democratic state, with a new constitution that guarantees the freedom to live and earn a living anywhere within its territory.

Despite, or even in spite of, state claims to the contrary, Muslims or people with Somali-like features are being subjected to extra ‘scrutiny’, as they supposedly pose a security threat. I have heard relatively educated, liberal-minded and supposed defenders of human rights argue that if it is necessary to subject Somalis (even Kenyan Somalis) to security checks, then let it be. Their reason is: you can never be sure. When challenged to explain this statement such individuals resort to mumbling incomprehensible details about innocent-looking suicide bombers.

We have conveniently forgotten that a few years ago the same security measures that we are allowing agents of the state to take against Somalis caused much suffering and deaths of Kenyans from all walks of life because the state then deemed anybody opposed to its policies as a saboteur. How can Somalis whose ancestry is in this country, who may have no idea where Baidoa, Mogadishu or Kismayu is, who have served this country like many other Kenyans, who pay their taxes, or who swear their loyalty to the nation of Kenya suddenly become ‘like their cousins?’ How else would such Kenyans affirm their Kenyanness? Or rather, should they even be interested anymore in claiming their citizenship?

These questions are not new in this country. In fact they are questions that many communities that straddle country borders live with everyday. But they are pertinent to ask because they highlight how bigoted the many can be when relating to the few. The category of the few is a very political one. Are people of Asian descent in Kenya a minority or not? And if they are, in what sense are they? If we use the term commonly used in Kenya, Indians are a minority demographically. But they are a fair number in the business world. They control a large chunk of the Kenyan economy. For that many Kenyans like them, because they offer a livelihood. But because when compared to Black Africans they become a minority, many Kenyans willingly see Indians in a different light; a very prejudiced colour.

This is why stories abound of how many Indian families go on ‘holiday’ abroad when general elections are in the offing. Some accounts claim that rich Kenyans from the other races too ‘travel abroad’ around election time. This action underlines the ambiguity of the multiple identities that many Kenyans live with. Modernity has saddled millions of people with different forms of identification, many of which can’t be easily reconciled. Probably there is never a need to merge these identities because in many cases one only needs a few to transact social life every day. But the demands of an often wildly transforming life in which the television, the internet, the mobile telephone, or air travel seem to have imposed on humankind a tougher assignment of how to deal with the different refractions of our, and others’, identities.

What do we do when someone we thought we knew so well turns out to be an assassin or a religious fanatic calling for the deaths of those with different religious beliefs? How should we react when at the airport we are asked to ‘step aside’, for extra security checks, simply because we are wearing a hijab or because one’s skin colour is too dark or because one has an accent? Should we get angry and swear to pay back when back at home or whenever opportunity to reciprocate in such bigotry presents itself?

Can the prayers of those who preach cosmopolitanism like Kwame Anthony Appiah (see Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2007) and those who preached multiculturalism before really be answered in the modern world? Isn’t today’s world too fractured, too individuated or too beholden to the market and consumption to really care about how we treat each other? Is it possible to ever remain loyal to one identity these days when, to use a religious term, temptations abound? But the flipside question is: can we really reject some of our primary identities? Can I dump my Luo identity when it is cast in my surname? Can we even start to ponder discarding our Kenyanness, however elusive and illusive it might be. What do we do with the simulacrum of the village that globalization presents to us? Probably Appiah is right: we need a new ethics and a new language with which to begin ‘seeing’ others as belonging to the human race again, if we intend to start a conversation on identity in the 21st century.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Tom Odhiambo is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Nairobi.
* This article was first published by Awaaz Magazine.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.