It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

of fecal waste sucked out of the horror toilets.’

      East African Standard, 4 January 2005

      In his youth, John had written a Kafkaesque short story about a man who wakes one morning to discover a giant pile of manure has been dumped outside his house. Puzzled, he sets out to establish where it came from and, more importantly, how to shift it. Oddly prescient, the story was a harbinger of John's future task.

      Rather than a pile of manure, corruption in Kenya resembled one of the giant rubbish dumps that form over the decades in Nairobi's slums. Below the top layer of garbage, picked over by goats, marabou storks and families of professional scavengers, lies another layer of detritus. And another. With the passage of time the layers, weighed down from above, become stacked like the pastry sheets of a mille-feuille, a historical record no archaeologist wants to explore. Each stratum has a slightly different consistency – the garbage trucks brought mostly plastics and cardboard that week, perhaps, less household waste and more factory refuse – but it all smells identical, letting off vast methane sighs as it settles and shifts, composting down to something approaching soil. The sharp stink of chicken droppings, the cabbagy reek of vegetable rot, the dull grey stench of human effluvia blend with the smoke from charcoal fires and the haze of burning diesel to form a pungent aroma – ‘Essence of Slum’, a parfumier might call it – that clings to shoes and permeates the hair.

      As Kenya has modernised, so its sleaze has mutated, a new layer of graft shaped to match each layer of economic restructuring and political reconfiguration. ‘In Kenya, corruption doesn't go away with reform, it just migrates,’ says Wachira Maina, a constitutional lawyer and analyst. But under all the layers, at the base of the giant mound, lies the same solid bedrock: Kenyans' dislocated notion of themselves. The various forms of graft cannot be separated from the people's vision of existence as a merciless contest, in which only ethnic preference offers hope of survival.

      If, in the West, it is impossible to use the word ‘tribe’ without raising eyebrows, in Kenya much of what takes place becomes incomprehensible if you try stripping ethnicity from the equation. ‘A word will stay around as long as there is work for it to do,’ said Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe of this taboo noun,³ and in Kenya, just as in so many African states, ‘tribe’ is still on active duty. Ask a Kenyan bluntly what tribe he is and he may, briefly, ruffle up and take offence. But the outrage dissolves immediately upon contact with daily life. ‘Typical Mukamba, useless with money,’ a friend mutters when a newspaper vendor fumbles his change. Another, arriving late at a café, explains: ‘I had to straighten up the car because the askari was giving me a hard time. Best not to mess with these Maasai.’ And when another is fined for parking illegally, he explains: ‘I begged with the policeman, but he wouldn't let me off. He was a Kalenjin.’

      Any Kenyan can reel off the tags and stereotypes, which capture the categorisation of the country's society. Hard-nosed and thrusting, the Kikuyu are easily identified by their habit of mixing up their ‘r’s and their ‘L’s, the cause of much hilarity amongst their compatriots. When an official warns you, ‘There may be a ploblem,’ a member of civil society denounces ‘ligged erections’ or an urchin tries to sell you a week-old ‘rabradol’ puppy, you know you are dealing with either a Kikuyu or his Meru or Embu cousin. Their entrepreneurialism has won them control of the matatu trade, and they run most of the capital's kiosks, restaurants and hotels. A Luo, on the other hand, is all show and no substance. His date will be wined and dined, but she'll pick up the tab at the end of the evening. Born with huge egos, the flashiest of dress sense and the gift of the gab, the Luo excel in academia and the media. Luhyas are said to lack ambition, excelling as lowly shamba boys, watchmen and cooks. Stumpy, loyal, happy to take orders, Kambas are natural office clerks, soldiers and domestic servants; but watch out for potions, freak accidents and charms under the bed – these are the spell-casters of Kenya. Enticing and provocative, their women dress in eye-wateringly bright colours and often work as barmaids. In contrast, the cold, remote Kalenjin care more about their cows than about their homes. Macho and undomesticated, the proud Samburu and Maasai make for perfect recruits to the ranks of watchmen, wildlife rangers and security guards. And so on …

      When they speak in this way, Kenyans show, at least, a refreshing honesty. Public discourse is far more hypocritical. In matters ethnic, newspaper and radio station bosses adopt a policy of strict self-censorship. Telling themselves they must play their part in the forging of a young nation state, editors have for decades carefully removed all ethnic identifiers from articles and broadcasts. But it doesn't take long to work out what is really going on, or why one VIP is throwing the taunt of ‘tribalist’ – Kenya's favourite political insult – in another's face. If a surname isn't enough to accurately ‘place’ a Kenyan, laborious verbal codes do the trick. A commentator who coyly refers to ‘a certain community’, or the ‘people of the slopes’, means the Kikuyu and their kinsfolk from the Mount Kenya foothills. ‘People of the milk’ indicates the livestock-rearing Kalenjin or Maasai. If he cites ‘the people of the lake’ or ‘those from the west’, he means the Luo, whose territory runs alongside Lake Victoria and whose failure to practise circumcision – gateway to adulthood amongst Bantu communities – prompts widespread distrust. The sly euphemisms somehow end up conveying more mutual hostility than a franker vocabulary ever could. Like the ruffled skirts which covered the legs of grand pianos in the Victorian age, they actually draw attention to what they are supposed to conceal: an acute sensitivity to ethnic origin.

      The fixation shocks other Africans, who privately whisper at how ‘backward’ they find Kenya, with its talk of foreskins and its focus on male appendages. ‘There's no ideological debate here,’ complain incoming diplomats, baffled by a political system in which notions of ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’, ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’ seem irrelevant: ‘It's all about tribe.’ Directors of foreign NGOs puzzle over the fact that political parties, born and dying with the speed of dragonflies, either don't bother publishing manifestos, or barely know their contents. But who needs a manifesto when a party's only purpose is furthering its tribe's interests? Tribe is the first thing Kenyans need to know about one another, the backdrop against which all subsequent interaction can be interpreted, simultaneously haven, shield and crippling obligation. The obsession is so pervasive, Kenyans struggle to grasp that it may not extend beyond the country's borders. ‘So,’ commented a Kikuyu taxi driver when he overheard me expressing scepticism about the likelihood of an Obama win in the 2008 US election, ‘I see you Westerners have problems with the Luo too.’

      Yet, perversely, the strength of these stereotypes is in inverse proportion to their longevity. Rooted in the country's experience as a British colony, Kenya's acute ethnic self-awareness, far from being an expression of ‘atavistic tribal tensions’, is actually a fairly recent development. While no one would claim that colonialism created the country's tribal distinctions, it certainly ensured that ethnic affiliation became the key criterion determining a citizen's life chances.

      Some time towards the end of the nineteenth century, the story goes, a great Kikuyu medicine man, Mugo Wa Kibiru, woke up trembling, bruised and unable to speak. When he recovered his voice, he issued a terrible prophecy. There would come a time of great hunger, he said, after which strangers resembling little white frogs, wearing clothes that looked like butterfly wings, would arrive bearing magic sticks that killed as no poisoned arrow could. They would bring a giant iron centipede, breathing fire, which would stretch from the big water in the east to the big water in the west, and they would be intent on stripping his people of all they possessed. His people should not fight these strangers. They must treat them with caution and courtesy, the better to learn their ways. The strangers would only depart once they had passed on the secrets of their power.

      His prophecy was an uncannily accurate description of the railway that would eventually stretch more than a thousand kilometres from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It would never have existed had it not been for William Mackinnon, a Scottish magnate with an evangelical agenda and a romantic appetite for empire, whose imagination was fired by reports brought back by Livingstone and Stanley. The lush kingdom of Buganda, nestling on the shores of Africa's giant freshwater lake in what is today southern Uganda,