The latest issue of The American Interest has a somewhat lengthy article on Kenya from Economist online contributor Misha Mintz-Roth. “Skin-Deep Democracy: A Letter From Kenya” reveals some of the strengths but also many of the weaknesses of contemporary reportage from Africa.
Mintz-Roth spent time with the locals, provides some nifty descriptions and puts forward a clear argument. Yet in an article that takes gratuitous and unnecessarily broad swipes at the supposed ignorance and wilfull distortions of NGO’s Mintz-Roth commits a few sins of his own. Not least among these is succumbing to hoary tropes about tribalism.
Thus Mintz-Roth writes reductively and deterministically about “thousand year” rivalries between Kenyan tribes, apparently unaware of the nature of “tribalism,” of the invented traditions of “tribes” and of the overwhelmingly colonial and post-colonial roots of these rivalries. But furthermore, she seems to place tribalism ahead of the political machinations that make “tribe” matter as a concept in modern Kenya, or really just about anywhere in modern Africa where tribal rivalries are lazily invoked as shorthand for far more complex processes.
Mintz-Roth may well be right that Kenya’s democracy today is “skin deep” but shallow generalizations and ahistorical assertions are not going to help in our understanding of the situation there. Tribe must be understood as part of larger historical and political trends and as part of a complex mixture of ethnicity and power politics and economics and social status and geography.