On Colonial "Favoritism"

Conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world, states that the colonial "divide and rule" policy created the acrimonious institution of "tribes" by freezing African identities and favoring one group frozen in that identity to the detriment of the others. The Tutsi of Rwanda and the Agikuyu of Kenya are often cited as examples of those who were favored; but upon close examination of history, this thesis reveals some loopholes.

But before dealing with the particular histories, it is important to note that the very idea of being "favored" by a colonial power is an oxymoron, for being appointed to the head of an oppressed group does not redeem one from the fundamental status of being oppressed. To use Malcolm X's analogy, both a field slave and a house slaves are slaves, even though the latter may be more inclined than the former to sympathize with the slave master. So, even if we were to accept the argument that the Tutsi and Agikuyu were "favored," the fact remains that they still occupied the position of the colonized in both the Belgian and British colonies.

A good illustration of this argument can be found in a book Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. The book is about Henry Brown's daring escape from slavery by having himself shipped from Virginia to freedom in Pennsylvania, a grueling trip that took 27 hours and covered over 350 miles. In the first half of his narrative, Henry Brown notes that their living conditions were much "better" than those of slaves from other plantations. While he wore shoes, vests and hats, slaves from a neighboring plantation wore coffee sacks, with no shoes, vests and hats. In addition, Brown was not whipped as slaves from other plantations were. Despite this apparent difference in the way he was treated, Brown still states with conviction: "The slave always has the harrowing idea before him - however kindly he may be treated for the time being - that the auctioneer may soon set him up for public sale and knock him down as the property of a person who, whether man or demon, would pay his master the greatest number of dollars for his body." Brown would experience this bitter truth when his wife and children were taken away and sold to a slave owner in North Carolina.

Therefore, if we grasp the fact that a slave is still a slave, no matter how well he's dressed or treated, then we would understand the problem of equating the elevated status granted to some Tutsi and Gikuyu individuals as "favoritism." We would also see the pathology of the hatred meted against members of these communities by their neighboring ones. The diatribe against the Tutsi and Gikuyu, culminating in genocide and massacres against them for the simple fact of whom they were born as, are equivalent to slaves in the other plantations killing Brown and his comrades because Brown's master gave his slaves better clothing and did not whip them. My knowledge of African American history is shallow, but I am almost sure that by now I would have heard of an instance in which some slaves massacred others out of jealousy that the latter were treated "better." In addition, blaming colonialism for creating "tribes," rather than for the very act of subjugation that made the creation of "tribes" necessary to facilitate colonial rule, is the same as blaming slavery for creating a division between field and house slaves rather than for the act of uprooting Africans from their home continent, selling them as merchandise in the Americas and then treating them worse than animals.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with the belief in one "tribe" having been "favored" by colonial rule: the failure to grasp that colonial rule was fundamentally a form of oppression, and worse, an inherent belief that oppression is not oppression if it is meted out by the white man, but only if it is meted by the black man from another "tribe." Worst of all, this way of "distinguishing" oppressions reinforces an insidious ideology that Africans deserve to be oppressed, and so we do not have the option to be free, but the option to determine whether we prefer oppressors from the Caucasian, Tutsi or Gikuyu "tribes." It is this narrative that makes America expect black Americans to look at our continent and thank God that they "got on" the slave ship, as if the Africans who were destined for a life of misery and oppression in the Americas willingly walked on board.

But even historically, the argument that the Tutsi and Agikuyu enjoyed colonial favoritism does not hold. If the Tutsi indeed enjoyed colonial rule, why would the Tutsi elite agitate for independence in the 1960's? In fact, the first pogrom against the Tutsis was before, not after independence, for the simple reason that the Belgians radically changed their policy of drawing the elites from the Tutsi to drawing them from the Hutu in order to stem the tide of the clamor of independence. This resulted in the pathology that culminated in the genocide in 1994, for instead of seeing the Belgian colonizers as the enemy, the Hutu leaders brainwashed the citizens into believing that the Tutsi were their main oppressors and that they needed to conduct a peasant revolution à la française against the Tutsi. Illustrations of this distortion of reality are found in Alfred Ndhahiro and Privat Rutazibwa's Hotel Rwanda, Or the Genocide of Tutsis As Seen By Hollywood. There are sad pictures of people with posters that accuse the Tutsi of imposing "slavery" on the Hutu, and another more unfortunate one in which one man holds a poster reading "Vive la tutelle belge" (Long Live the Belgian Protectorate). What we see here is people preferring Belgian colonialism to "slavery" under the Tutsi instead of addressing the fundamental question of freedom from any oppression. And this pathology continues to drive the genocide ideology that is still expounded today in some circles.

For the Gikuyu, the absurdity of colonial favoritism becomes more pronounced. The land of the Gikuyu was forcibly annexed by British settlers. After the declaration of the emergency in the 1950's, whole families and villages were taken to concentration camps in which they lived under harrowing conditions. In many places, men could hardly be found in the communities because they were either in jail or in the forest fighting with the Mau Mau. The gory details of the violence, torture and rape with crude instruments that the British meted out on the Gikuyu can be found in numerous history books and memoirs. It is difficult to imagine how this could be considered "favoritism," and the fact that this has happened demonstrates the pathology of racism that has been internalized by Africans.

Many have sustained the thesis of favoritism by referring to the fact that the British missionaries built more schools in Central Province than in any other. However, the reality is that more schools in Central Province make sense in the colonial logic, because the Europeans needed to pacify the Gikuyu as they stole their land. The schools were not, therefore, a "favor" or colonial "benefit." Besides, if we accept that and churches and schools were the ideological instrument of colonialism, it seems absurd to then argue that they were "gifts" to the Gikuyu.

Of course, one may argue that after colonialism the Gikuyu stood to benefit since those with Western education were likely to get jobs in government, but that distracts us from addressing the more fundamental problem - that our education system, whose language of instruction is still English - alienates African students from understanding their own societies and makes African graduates inclined to protect the interests of Western countries to the detriment of their own people. In fact, it is because access to Western education and Western standards of living remains the foundation of the elite in Kenya, and the fundamental tool through which Kenyan elites buy voters' allegiance, that the return to the Gikuyu religion and the rejection of Christianity, now embodied by the Mungiki, scares the hell out of Kenya's elites of all ethnic communities. By the same token, a return to Gikuyu religion and rejection of Christianity must necessarily be violent; hence the violent and ritualistic nature of Mungiki and of the government's interactions with them.

To then use the problematic narrative of colonial favoritism to explain the genocide in Rwanda or the recent violence in Kenya becomes dangerous. It inherently justifies the organizers, political ideologues and financiers of the crimes committed in Rwanda and Kenya by equating their crimes to the struggles against colonialism. Yet one would not accept such an argument to be applied to South Africa, Zimbabwe or Kenya that would imply that Africans are justified to exterminate the Boers or the white settlers because of the superior status of whites during apartheid and colonialism. Mugabe has become the devil incarnate of the Western world because of his land redistribution policy that disfavored white Zimbabweans, but when Rift Valley leaders apply the same to the Gikuyu, the same Western world calls for dialogue between the warring parties. Thus, the word "tribe" that is applied to conflicts between Africans only, as opposed to between Africans and Europeans, indicates the double standard applied to colonially rooted land issues.

The other problem with the concept of "tribe" is that it emanates from a colonial ideology that one community can only relate to the "other" from an inferior or superior position, but never as an equal. Thus, the ideology of the genocidaires embodied in the "Hutu Ten Commandments" was not that all Rwandans are human beings. It was that the Hutu were superior, and in a superior-inferior relationship, the inferior one must be eliminated. Likewise, in Kenya, whoever wins the presidency is necessarily expected to suppress, or even eliminate, members of all "other tribes," and so disputes about the presidency are in reality about which tribe should have its turn to oppress the other Kenyans. Thus, the real issue in Kenya is not ethnic favoritism as the Kenya elites have been forcing the citizens to believe; it is about a presidency that we inherently distrust, and which Kenyan politicians want to preserve, because it gives excessive powers to one person to do with it as he wishes. That is why the reduction of presidential powers and a re-engineering of the Kenyan psyche to see power as a relationship of responsibility, rather than of exploitation of an inferior by a superior, must be the first agenda on our reconciliation time-table. Until this is done, we will continue to consider Kenya's resources the personal property of the president and of his "tribe."

Once we understand that the colonial relationship still remains the model of power in most African states, we see why the false narratives of Tutsi slave masters and Gikuyu people as the apple of the British eye was so easily accepted, with deadly results. African states did not dismantle the oppressive relationship between leaders and their citizens but simply replaced white colonizers with Africans ones. And just like whites who, as Fanon says in The Wretch of the Earth, were seen as rich because they were white and white because they were rich, the "tribe" of the president is seen as rich because they are that "tribe," and that "tribe" because they are rich. Meanwhile, non-Gikuyu Kenyan elites who are wealthier than the majority of the Gikuyu population, or the Hutu elites richer than the majority of Tutsis talked and walked as if they were the peasants they were not.

That is how the dominant political narrative in Kenya after independence equated Gikuyu elites such as Jomo Kenyatta - who sold out to the British - with the Gikuyu freedom fighters and peasants who did not get back the land that they fought for. Kenyans gradually forgot that colonialism was necessarily oppressive to everyone and saw the Gikuyu people who settled outside Central Province as people who were "favored" since colonialism, rather than as victims of a resettlement program made necessary by the fact that Kenyatta let the British settlers stay on land that they acquired through injustice. The elites of other communities, notably Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Pinto de Gama, tried to bring back Kenyans' minds to the fact that the British still occupied land acquired unjustly, but Kenyatta and his cronies wouldn't hear of it. This was because at independence, Kenyatta had usurped the historical credit for the Mau Mau resistance yet, as the late Bildad Kaggia notes in his autobiography, Kenyatta had consistently distanced himself from the Mau Mau at the height of the war. Moreover, while Kenyatta let British settlers remain in Kenya, he acquired massive tracts of land using British loans for which the people of Kenya would pay, and which his family still owns.

Rather than tackle Kenyatta's problematic legacy, Kenya took the easy route of equating the misrule of Kenyatta with that of the entire Gikuyu people. The result is that we sanitized colonialism by equating it with a "national cake" which some Kenyan "tribe" called the Gikuyu ate exclusively while the rest of Kenya starved. This narrative also wiped the last 40 years or so of Kenya's history from our consciousness. The non-Gikuyu elites, particularly of the Kalenjin community who occupied many top seats in government during former President Moi's rule, are conspicuously absent in this narrative, and few will speak of the Gikuyu people who populate the sprawling Mathare slums because the slum dwellers contradict the myth of favoritism. Meanwhile, the politicians who have demonized the Gikuyu appeal to Western Europe to support their fight for "justice," while in Rwanda, the Interahamwe leaders rallied frenzied mobs around welcoming the French soldiers and cajoled France's distorted ego while they massacred the Tutsi. France repaid the favor by defending the Rwanda government at the United Nations and instituting the dubious humanitarian Operation Turquoise that ended up giving the genocidaires safe passage out of Rwanda.

Under such conditions, it is understandable that a lawyer could seriously suggest, in a full page article in one of Kenya's main dailies, that Kenya would be better off reverting to its status as a British colony. The analogies he drew were even more surprising. He equated recolonized Kenyans with English settlers in New Zealand and Australia, forgetting that when Kenya was a colony, Africans occupied the position of the indigenous peoples of the two Pacific countries who are still a minority on their home soil. Even more fascinating was the irony that this article appeared a few weeks after the Australian government issued a formal apology to indigenous peoples.

The fact that Kenya's national consciousness follows a distorted narrative which sanitizes colonialism and demonizes a tribe does not mean that there is no discrepancy in the infrastructure in Central Province as opposed to Nyanza, North Eastern, North Rift Valley and the Coast provinces. The discrepancy is there and it is unjust, and must be redressed. But to avoid the vicious and deadly cycle of blaming this discrepancy on a tribe, which inherently dehumanizes the non-Gikuyu majority and absolves them of responsibility in fashioning their own destiny, the problem must be addressed in terms of the failures of specific leaders and institutions, not as the fault of the communities that the leaders come from.

The belief that the Gikuyu idolize Kenyatta and are hell bent on a having one of their own as president is a lie. To many of them, Kenyatta was no angel but a sell out, and the fact that his son is now deputy prime-minister is a tragedy that is the fruit of a rehabilitation project of non other than former president Daniel arap Moi. And to be honest, intellectuals have sometimes undermined the possibility of helping Kenyans understand that we were all colonized together; it was not some who were "more" colonized or colonized "better" than the others.

The accent on the Mau Mau as those who struggled against colonialism has seemed to minimize the contributions of Kenyans from other communities to our country's history, an important point that was highlighted in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration, a publication edited by E. S. Adhiambo and John Lonsdale, albeit with an unnecessarily caustic tone. In fact, the energy that the volume spent decrying the dominance of the Mau Mau narrative would have been put to better use by highlighting the achievements of other Kenyans on their own merit, rather than in opposition to the Mau Mau. The Mau Mau do not need to be demystified; rather, it is other heroes like Mekatilili, Oginga Odinga, Pio Gama Pinto, Elijah Masinde and Koitalel arap Samoei, as well as the resistance movements among the Nandi and Miji Kenya among others, which need to be mystified. There is enough space in the Kenyan imagination for recognition of a plethora of heroes from all ethnic groups. The more, the better, and the spiritually richer Kenyans will be. By contrast, demystifying one group so that another takes its place is the rehearsal of a winner-take-all ideology on the platform of history. It also raises the unsettling question of if Kenya's history is being rewritten for Kenya's youth to understand their complex heritage or to urge the Western world to correct its distorted perception of Kenya.

However, one must also note that some Kenyan intellectuals have been insensitive to the potential polarization of Kenya as they hail the Mau Mau. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who receives the brunt of discontent in the Adhiambo and Lonsdale volume, didn't help things much when he wrote a piece praising Mwai Kibaki that appeared in Kenya's press a week before last year's elections, especially because he seemed to forget that his troubles started during Kenyatta's regime, and that his detention papers were signed by Kibaki himself when Kibaki was Vice-President.

The prominence of the Mau Mau may also be rooted in colonialism because of one single factor: the defining characteristic of racism is its reduction of the complexity of black societies to one single group or person. The British made a big deal about the Mau Mau, to the extent of attributing to them the dreaded title of terrorists, because the nature of colonialism to deny that resistance to oppression transcended class and ethnic groups. The reason that Jomo Kenyatta was handed the British constitution was not because of his exemplary credentials, but in order to deflect the world's attention from the fact that Africans - of all ethnic groups and classes - fought for freedom and won. This dynamic is similar to what happened in the United States when America's distaste for Martin Luther King dissipated when Malcolm X showed up. And once Malcolm was gone, Martin Luther King was also killed by an assassin's bullet.

In other words, the British are partly responsible for the deification of the Mau Mau at the expense of other Kenyans. Kenya's politicians have simply taken over from where the British left in rendering the Gikuyu, rather than the British, the scapegoat for all Kenya's colonially rooted problems. Former president Moi and Raila Odinga continued this game in 2002 when Raila supported Kibaki's first presidential term in order to rival Moi's imposition of Uhuru Kenyatta on the ruling KANU party. Why Moi and Raila engaged in such a trivial scramble for the Central Province vote is puzzling, since Moi ruled for 24 years and won two successive presidential terms despite his ostracization of the Gikuyu. Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta also bear responsibility for this mess because they entered deadly political bargains based on the same Gikuyu vs. Kenya framework, sacrificing people's lives in their personal quests for power.

Tensions are still high in Kenya and wounds are still raw, and so it is understandable if Kenyans still seek comfort in colonially manufactured and ready-made narratives about tribes and colonial favoritism, rather than taking a meticulous and disciplined look at their history. They are not doing much different from the rest of the world which is currently in turmoil and in a moral crisis. Modernity has destabilized centuries' long identities, especially in Africa where modernity usually takes the form of Western culture that necessarily negates African ones. This has led people to feel that they must reaffirm old traditions at any cost, while others feel in desperate need for a dramatic change.We have witnessed this instability in the United States that voted for a humble-looking Texan George Bush to reaffirm the United States after the September 11 terrorist attacks, or in France that chose for president a verbose, media-intriguing personality who later capped his intrigue by marrying a former fashion model.

Nevertheless, one day, tempers in Kenya raised by the tribal discourse will calm down. When that day comes, I hope we will finally accept that there is no such thing as colonial favoritism. Colonialism is inherently a violent, degrading and oppressive institution, and to envy an oppressed group, given the dubious title of "tribe," for being closer to the master's table, is no substitute to fighting for justice or to the replacement of colonial institutions with institutions that respect the humanity of every African, regardless of ethnicity.