Mis/trust and political competition in post-devolution Gusiiland, south-west Kenya: an ethnography of electoral patronage

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AbstractIn Kenya, the transition to a devolved system of governance in 2013 buoyed hopes for meaningful democratization. County governments were expected to lower the stakes of electoral competition, distribute national resources more equitably, enable citizens to hold their local leaders to account, and thus promote impersonal forms of political trust in state institutions and bureaucratic procedures. Yet personalistic trust based on shared kinship and ethnic identities continues to characterize citizen–state relations. This article explores how and why. It does so based on ethnographic fieldwork in post-devolution Gusiiland, an ethnically homogeneous and politically fragmented context where clan and sub-clan kinship identities remain central to local electoral mobilization. Here, competing for office means negotiating alliances that bridge polities divided by a history of uneven development, partisan patronage, and intersecting clannist, classist and patriarchal prejudices. Candidates negotiate such alliances by partnering with local ‘agents’ or intermediaries, who broker votes and patronage in their families and family networks. Zooming in on candidate–agent cooperation, the article shows how its terms and outcomes are partly contingent on intermediaries’ gender, class and personal reputation, as well as rivalries among families and voters vying for brokerage positions. The brokerage of patronage systematically recreates the material conditions of possibility not just for transcending but also for lending fresh legitimacy to normative conceptions of trust as ‘natural’ among kin. Thus, the resilience of kinship-based trust can be explained in terms of the plasticity of patronage-based electoral mobilization and its potential to enact moral ideals of kinship in new, seemingly democratic ways.