I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya (review)

Abstract

Gabrielle Lynch, Say to You: Ethnic Politics and in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 283 pp. This account of ongoing importance of ethnic affiliation in contemporary Kenyan political life begins with proposition that ethnic identities are often recent constructs, but nonetheless enjoy a seemingly and natural appeal. Gabrielle Lynch describes how their potential to unite and divide depends on contextually discernable categories of people based on assumed commonalities and differences in histories and cultures. In today's globalized world, ethnic identities enjoy recognition through cultural and peoples' rights and specially designed institutional frameworks. In multi-party electoral politics, ethnic identities can be mobilized by political leaders, educated elites, local elders, and urban and rural residents to promote and defend socioeconomic and political interests. But there is also concern about potential for sense of ethnic difference to activate or endorse violent atrocities against other. Fueled by ethnic-politicking and opportunism, Kenya's post-election violence in 2008 led to death of 1300 people and displaced well over half a million. Say to You offers a meticulously researched, minutely documented history of ethnic group in Kenya. The label Kalenjin, which means I say to you, dates from mid-20th century and refers to linguistic propinquity of peoples subsumed under this designator. In calculus of colonial administration, sub-groups were regarded as separate tribes. A tiny group of politically aware and active members of Nandi and Kipsigis socio-linguistic groups came up with idea of as an inclusive ethnic category as a means to meet needs and interests of their communities. This effort gained some ground and the Kalenjin became a group acknowledged by colonial government, among others, during turbulent decade before independence. Local fears of marginalization and exclusion and assumed benefits of amalgamation initiated construction of this new inclusive identity, but did not foment a popular sense of difference and competition until Mau Mau emergency lent shape, menace, and immediacy to communal fears. Approaching independence opened up political competition and economic production to African citizens, thus creating new opportunities for ownership and control of power, wealth, and geographical space. This in turn raised expectations of development in newly independent country, but also heightened fears of groups that felt potentially threatened by other powerful groups of Kenyans. Lynch's central argument is that while processes of ethnic construction and negotiation are limited by need for ethnicity to be rooted in primordial discourses of cultural similarity and shared pasts, main motivation for construction and politicization of alliance was, and continues to be, a nexus of fear of loss and potential for gain. From outset, ethnic narratives of territoriality, threat, and opportunity were intertwined with a portrait of community's marginality and vulnerability as ethnic others to rising power groups in post-independence Kenya. To this point, narratives made a collective claim to Rift Valley on basis of prior residence and an assumed right of locals to own and control their homelands. Lynch's analysis is most convincing as she traces construction and popularization of inclusive identity and its early and active rejection of Mau Mau. Anti-Kikuyuism discourse came to fore just prior to independence as did an ethnically delineated notion of territorial ownership and control. By independence, popular logic encouraged by colonial experience to think and act ethnically classified regional disparities in economic development, including formal employment, mission influence, and divergent fortunes of agricultural and pastoralist communities. …