Ethnic or Economic Violence: The Real Cause of Kenya's 2007 Election Violence

Abstract

Violence between various ethnic groups when sudden and out of context may not be about ethnicity at all. In this paper I seek to unveil the causes of the violence in Kenya after the 2007 elections by examining Kenya’s economic and political history. I begin, in Section I, with a brief overview of the post-election violence in Kenya, noting the overly simplistic approach taken by many Western Media sources in pointing to ethnic hatred as the root cause of this violence. In Section II, I review the history of Kenya’s economy during colonialism, and the level of inequality among Africans under the colonial regime. Next, in Section III, I explain the independence movement in Kenya, noting that the Luo and Kikuyu represented the two major poles of influence in the anti-colonialist movement. In Section IV, I then document how ethnicity politics came to dominate Kenya’s post-colonial political economy, first with Kenyatta and then with Moi. In Section V analyze ethnicity politics, arguing that the colonial policies set the stage for a competition over resources, which evolved into ethnic competition. Finally, in Section VI, I reassess the conflict in Kenya by incorporating Kenya’s economic and social history and the nature of ethnic politics. I conclude that ethnicity is only a superficial cause of the violence in Kenya, and that fundamentally the violence is the result of an inadequate state capacity to ensure the basic needs of its citizens. In Section VII I summarize the historical factors that have influenced the violence in Kenya.