What really makes up tribe?
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By Samuel Abonyo Tribalism will live for at least another 50 years", Daniel Arap Moi said in 1957, historian Keith Kyle tells us in The Politics of the Independence of Kenya. Moi’s prophesy has been fulfilled, and his contribution to its fulfilment is huge. In the 1950s, his construction of the Kalenjin tribe begun in earnest, and by the 1990s, ‘Kalenjinisation’ was an established word in Kenya. Yet the existence of the Kalenjin tribe is still being contested. But what is tribe? A tribe, according to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, is a group of the same race, and with the same customs, language, religion, etc, living in a particular area and often led by a chief. Webster’s Dictionary says a tribe is any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs and traditions and adherence to the same leaders. Evidently, the definitions are not of much help, as, according to them, any group of people can conceivably be a tribe. Peter Skalnik, an anthropologist, believed tribes were politically defined units having dimensions such as culture, language and territory. To that strange belief, he added the weird opinion that the basic tribal identities are ancient, powerful and closed to amelioration, with the result that hostility and tensions break out when members of different tribes come into contact. Skalnik’s definition is definitely an exercise in pure futility. In Ethnic Groups And Boundaries, social anthropologist Fredrik Barth says tribal groupings "are categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves" that structure interaction between people. Master status In the opinion of social anthropologists, tribe has other attributes in addition to that basic one. A tribe, they believe, is largely biologically self-perpetuating, shares fundamental cultural values, makes up a field of communication, and has membership that identifies itself and is identified by others as constituting a group different from others of the same order. A tribe is a label, logo, categorical identity that classifies you in terms of the biological background assumed to form your ancestry. It is a socially defined biological master status others use to recognise the difference between you and them and which you use to distinguish yourself from them. The other has its own socially defined biological master status. A tribe is a socially defined master status from which, because it is strictly enforced by sanctions of all sorts and the many mechanisms of social control that are the cages in which our lives are kept, those it includes and those it excludes can escape only at the price of achieving the status of social deviants. Most people conform to the rigidities that are our lives, so that the tribe’s stranglehold on us is immensely powerful indeed. But they are not concrete, they cannot be seen, they cannot be touched, and they cannot be counted. They are not real. But they count. And they have real and palpable consequences. We are members of our tribes. But tribal membership does not constitute tribalism. The existence of tribes is not a necessary and sufficient condition for tribalism to occur. For tribalism to arise, a tribe must be transformed into a tribe for itself. In pre-colonial Kenya, for example, there was no tribalism, even though we had tribes. But tribes were then not tribes for themselves. Tribalism was at the time not a reality, let alone the paramount reality it is now. We fell from tribe to tribalism because of colonialism. Colonialists exploited cultural pluralism to create tribalism. They brought with them Western nationalist discourse and ideology. Because of the discourse and ideology of nationalism, and Western criteria for success and achievement, they transplanted into Kenya, tribesmen began referring to their lots as better than their neighbours, or more advanced or superior in some way. That was tribalism. politically significant To institutionalise tribalism, the colonialists established administrative units that were almost the same as tribal ones. The practice of tribal geography, an effective means of maintaining tribalism, is still going on in Kenya. Once the colonialists had institutionalised tribalism, it now determined the life chances of individuals. Tribes became politically significant and now had leaders or spokesmen. They could now be represented as acting agents. They had gone past beginning to call themselves Luos, Nandis etc, to borrow a phrase from the nobleman in Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. The writer is a commentator on social issues.