“Until death do us part” is a vow that signifies that only death will part a married couple. At first blush, this sounds like a tyrannical statement. Why should a couple be condemned to suffer each other – until the sword of death splits them – even when the union has no meaning? That’s because the edict is a religious vow that views marriage as an unbreakable bond. We, of course, know this to be a blatant falsehood given the proliferation of divorce like a plague upon the land. The point, however, is that the “scared union” of husband and wife is akin to a suicide pact. The death of the union may kill both. Is a country – like Kenya – a suicide pact?
I didn’t call Kenya a “nation.” That’s because a nation is a normative description of an irreversible political and cultural identity. A Kenyan nation would imply a common zeitgeist that courses through the veins of every Kenyan. We know that’s not true. Most of us are paper citizens. It’s true the majority of us are “natives” of Kenya but nativity or indigeneity describes not an immutable identity. It only speaks to place of birth and ancestral origin. Most of us are indigenes and natives but members of a Kenyan nation we are not. Most of our people are siloed in ethnic cocoons of political bondage and false consciousness. At best, we are trapped in our pre-colonial ethnic identities.
Shouting match
Awhile back, Dr David Ndii, the economist, called Kenya a cruel marriage – and mused loudly that we should seek a divorce from one another. A rancorous national conversation – more like a melee intended to censure free speech – ensued. The reaction to Dr Ndii’s thought-provoking piece suggested that most “Kenyans” were either intellectually lazy, or hopelessly insecure. It was evidence that Kenya, in fact, doesn’t exist as a nation. Because there would be no need for a stunted and largely sterile shouting match over the question if it did. But the imbroglio was like an argument over whether an apple is an orange. Which fool can’t tell the difference? Those who protest the loudest usually have less to tell.
Let’s walk down memory lane. We didn’t choose to live together. By “we” I mean the various nations that constitute Kenya. The British forcibly created Kenya after the Scramble for Africa. They stole our lands and imposed a state on us. Take the Agikuyu and the Akamba, for example. The two peoples were largely neighborly – and part of a larger cultural cousinage with the Aembu and the Ameru. At times there were tiffs among them. I remember a neighbour’s wife in Kitui who had been captured as “bounty” from the Agikuyu. I am sure there were Akamba in similar “bondage” among the Agikuyu. I always found it interesting that the Gikuyu “bounty” regarded herself as Kamba.
But there were many unforced instances of assimilation among our different peoples. Peace largely prevailed them. But the experiment of living together under a forced artificial state has been challenging. Some African states have done better with this cruel hand dealt by the imperialists. Tanzania is my favourite example of an African post-colonial state that has cohered into a nation. Several others have come close. But most African states remain nations in embryo – under incubation. The transition from the embryonic stage to a true full term baby is an arduous one. It requires that we reach an inflection point of irreversibility. That means we must be forged by a singular anvil, a process that casts our identity almost in stone.
My view is that true nations have been forged in the crucible of fire. Either a violent event, or a deliberate elite-driven process, must happen. For the US – although Donald Trump is severely testing this theory – the civil war over racial equality and slavery – largely settled the defining principles of the American republic. That nasty and catastrophic conflict breathed practical life into the American constitution by affirming its central democratic tenets. Of course the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow in the South proved that the project of democracy is an experiment that’s never complete. Even so, the civil war stands out as the defining moment in the reconstitution of the American nation. Does Kenya have such a moment?
Let’s recalibrate
The answer is no. The struggle for independence, which united most of us against the British, could’ve been a nation-forging moment. But the founding fathers squandered it through greed, tribalism, myopia, and intellectual poverty. Where Mwalimu Nyerere and Tanu were building a nation in Tanzania, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Kanu were busy constructing an ethnic kleptocracy. Nearly six decades later, we are at each other throats in a deeply tribalised state. Let’s recalibrate, or fall asunder before death do us part.
- Prof Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School and Chair of KHRC. @makaumutua
