No empirical data exists to the best of my knowledge, but I would wager that Kenya’s most creative indigenous communities are the Kikuyu, the Somali, the Kisii and the Kamba.
The reasons are not difficult to fathom. The Kikuyu, for all practical purposes, lost their choice, fertile land to colonialists. Some were squatters in the 1930s, when other communities didn’t even know the word existed.
The Kisii have land but it is of such ridiculously tiny proportions that one wonders where those bananas they export to Nairobi daily are grown. And while the Somali and Kamba have huge tracts of land, those lands are arid to the point of being worthless — barring pastoralism, which is grossly inefficient, or an irrigation project by a benevolent foreign donor.
These land and water deficits have fired up creativity among these communities to dizzying levels. When I taught in Nyamira in the 1990s, for instance, virtually every person I met had a close relative studying in India or USA. Harambees were commonplace and the poorest villager would chip in. Everyone intrinsically understood that the community’s survival depended on ‘seed dispersal’.
Result? A whole county of Abagisii is resident in the US while people our education system labeled ‘failures’ are now thriving India-trained lawyers. Amazingly, the once arable farmers took to business like a fish thrown in water and today, many matatus in Nairobi are owned by Kisiis.
Interestingly, the community had fewer secondary schools than Luo Nyanza and none, save Cardinal Otunga and Kisii High, were of the pedigree of the Masenos and Kamusingas of this world. Yet recently, a report said Nyamira and Kisii are among Kenya’s ‘most educated’ counties.
The humble, decrepit community-built day schools of the 1990s, which had no laboratories, trained teachers or libraries, have come of age and today routinely feature in the top 100 county schools in KCPE.
Even more remarkable is that when I lived there, I never once saw a child who was hungry or malnourished. In fact, nursery school children carried porridge to school — like city kids. This is a far cry from many villages in Western Kenya where families go hungry for the better part of the year, despite owning comparatively larger pieces of land. The story of the Kikuyu entrepreneur on the other hand is too well known to belabour here except to say they exploit their tiny pieces of land with ruthless intensity and efficiency. Central Kenya is today a leader in fish farming, yet fish and fishponds were introduced barely five years ago, courtesy of then Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta’s Economic Stimulus Programme. Contrast this with my village, which probably has two fishponds, even with the stimulus programme, despite fish being an age-old delicacy.
But the Somali businessman, hardy as the African acacia, is something else. When he arrives in a rural town, the first thing he does is to check whether there is a Kikuyu present. That is enough confirmation that he will thrive. And thrive Somalis do, trading in virtually every county in the land and spreading out across Africa, Middle East, Europe and the Americas — for trade. Kambas, meanwhile, are renowned for turning worn out car tyres into cash. They will be found along the breadth of the country plying their trade on highways, as bored locals gossip about UhuRuto and Raila. How they survive on parched lands devoid of water back home is mind-boggling. Their incredible adaptability is reflected in the manner their daughters get married — for life — among practically every community in Kenya.
But these four intrepid tribes aside, the ingenuity of an average slum dweller is beyond anything a rich rancher would ever imagine. A rancher can afford it. He fences the land, enriches his pasture, manages his stocking quotas, watches the health of his herd, keeps out the wild game or turns it into a side hustle for tourism, and that is it. If famine or disease swept across the land, he would be ruined, yes, but he wouldn’t die of hunger.
That is a luxury a slum dweller can ill afford. He lives by his wits, striving to put food on the table, seeking places for his ablutions and evading illness, police and gangsters — daily. That calls for creativity. The number of innovations that spring up in Kibera would, therefore, stupefy your average university graduate. The kadogo economy, where you can buy a dollop of toothpaste smeared straight on your toothbrush, easily comes to mind. In fact, I am yet to see a malnourished slum child.
They will be playing beside a fetid gutter, all right, but somehow always sport chubby, well-fed faces. How, when many children in Western Kenya look hungry and sad, the wealth of their fathers’ soils notwithstanding? That’s why I believe the people of Western Kenya — and Luo Nyanza — will get extremely creative — and wealthy — when they eventually become landless and become forced to make money using their wits.
