Politics: Broader Ethnicity Good for Kenya's Nationhood

Abstract

It is often said that the multiplicity of ethnic communities, pejoratively referred to as tribes, is the bane of nationhood in most African countries, including Kenya. Indeed, Kenya is reported as having 43 ethnic communities that purportedly undermine our nationhood. A nation is loosely defined as a group of people, within a political entity called a State, who share a common language and culture. Politically, and this annoys Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o, rich countries are nations, even when they have a very small population like Norway or Belgium, but poor countries are just a group of tribes. This is demeaning. Ethnic clashes are reported, even by our very own journalists, as tribal clashes. The damage is in the mind. We describe ourselves using the lens of the oppressors. Language is everything, as Confucius once wrote. Ethnicity, just like nepotism, is not necessarily a bad phenomenon.