In 1963, the young Kenyan historian Bethwell Ogot called for politics to move beyond ethnicity and become truly national: “The African masses have to be persuaded to transfer their loyalties from an association they know and understand—the tribe—to something impersonal, abstract and as yet non-existent, called the nation.”Footnote 1 More than forty years later, in the wake of the terrifying and overtly ethnic violence that followed the elections of 2007, Ogot, who had in the intervening years become the country's most prominent public intellectual, lamented the continuing political power of tribalism in Kenyan public life.Footnote 2 His sentiment captured a wider sense of dismay at the persistence of the politics of ethnicity, in Kenya, and across much of Africa. In the first decades after independence, when the explicit language of politics emphasized nation-building, the tribe posed an awkward challenge for academic analysis.Footnote 3 Scholarship followed political rhetoric, and the word “tribe” fell from academic use in favor of the allegedly more neutral “ethnicity.” In 1971, the South African sociologist Archie Mafeje looked forward to a history that would overcome the legacy of a colonial experience that had “helped create the things called ‘tribes’ in Africa.”Footnote 4 Professional historians always enjoy denouncing amateur historical invention, and multiple studies subsequently articulated a vision of flexible precolonial ethnicities that were hardened by the experience of colonial rule and instrumentalized by missionaries, officials, and literate “culture brokers”—a transition summed up most cogently in John Lonsdale's contrast between “moral ethnicity” and “political tribalism.”Footnote 5
Critics of this literature who argued that it discounted African agency perhaps underestimated the extent to which some of it placed African “culture brokers” very much at the center of the process.Footnote 6 Its more significant weakness was a failure to explain what Crawford Young called “the intense passions” of ethnicity, or as John Peel put it, the need for ethnic identity to have a cultural basis that gives it force in everyday life.Footnote 7 As Peter Ekeh pointed out, while scholars shunned tribalism, it continued to thrive in popular discourse.Footnote 8 The force of that criticism has been underscored by repeated and sometimes horrifying demonstrations of the continued vitality of ethnic politics over the last two decades, “a brutal reminder,” in Carola Lentz's words, “that ethnicity cannot simply be explained away.”Footnote 9 Faced with a powerful politics of belonging and autochthony, academic work has turned steadily towards arguing for the resilience of “African conceptions of political space,” seeking the roots of ethnicity in quotidian behaviors that generate the “habitual dispositions” that underpin ethnic affinity, and even emphasizing the role of what Jonathon Glassman has called “modes of thought … inherited from precolonial traditions.” Paul Nugent's work has demonstrated that the construction of ethnicities in West Africa stretches back to well before the colonial period.Footnote 10 Such reevaluations, like those of the 1970s, fit into wider scholarly trends, in this case a tendency to emphasize long-term continuity in African political cultures and downplay the impact of what some would call “the colonial moment” in Africa.Footnote 11
The present paper reasserts the significance of that moment through revisiting the history of one particular ethnicity in Kenya. While we acknowledge the profound importance of cultural affect, and place African agency at the center of the processes we explore, we nonetheless follow Gabrielle Lynch's work in insisting on the importance of the final years of colonialism. This “critical juncture” was characterized by very public and often fierce politics, when the state was at its most intrusive and best resourced, even as its future was thrust dramatically into question by rapid political change.Footnote 12 Ethnicity was not a novel feature of the colonial world, but the processes through which ethnicities were made and remade gained new force because of colonialism. While the “roots of contemporary identities” may, as Nugent says, lie in the precolonial past, at least some of the efflorescent vigor of such identities is a result of more recent circumstances.Footnote 13 In particular, we will argue that the final years of colonial rule saw the embedding of a powerful, productive, discursive contrast in quotidian experience as well as in political argument.
Thomas Spear, in a recent critical survey of the literature on colonial invention, used the term “neo-traditionalism”—inspired by the political science notion of “neo-patrimonialism”—to emphasize that processes of innovation were always limited by culture, possibilities always constrained by the need to evoke people's lived experience.Footnote 14 In doing so, he has deployed the word “tradition” in two different ways. The first is to signify a particular performance or pattern of language that is established and familiar in a society—“a tradition.” It is the enduring influence of this kind of “tradition” that Spear emphasizes as a force limiting invention. But he also refers to tradition as a discursive tool, specifically as a way of arguing about the character of practices.Footnote 15 The story of the Mijikenda of Kenya's coast, the focus of this paper, suggests that while the first of Spear's meanings was significant in setting the “limits of invention,” it is the second that reveals just how transformative the colonial experience was in creating new possibilities for cultural entrepreneurship, legitimized by an idea of tradition which rested on its contrast with modernity.
This dichotomy has proven powerfully productive across Africa. As John Comaroff has suggested, colonial officials saw their role as “the practical management, often the production of, difference” between the modern and the traditional, and the African officials who took over the levers of the state in the early 1960s at least partly shared this assumption, seeing themselves as representatives of a modern state, dealing with an often intractable population.Footnote 16 The contrast between tradition and the multiple manifestations of modernity was not only the work of officials and teachers; the evocation of an alternative sphere of distinctive social relations, ruled by tradition, could also serve those who sought to evade or subvert the demands of officials, or to assert their own authority. In constant, implicit contrast to the “modern,” this too was a discursive tool used to “make political claims and envision different futures.”Footnote 17
James Ferguson's work on the Zambian Copperbelt and Lynn Thomas' study of Kenya in the 1960s have each shown how these contrasts featured in popular moral debate.Footnote 18 The evocation of this distinct sphere, conceived in explicit contrast to the modern, may not always have allowed people to “create … a space that stood separate from the state” as completely as James Giblin has suggested of the Tanzanian villagers whose stories he recorded, given that the rural homestead existed in the same money economy as the urban laborer who migrated from it.Footnote 19 But it did provide a way to negotiate individual and community authority. The idea of ethnicity explored in this paper drew on the productive power of this division between tradition and the multiple, modern antitheses which colonialism created for it. What Ogot has called “the invention of greater ethnic communities” that now plays so prominent a role in Kenyan politics must be understood partly in terms of cultural continuity, but this by itself cannot explain why political innovation has taken particular ethnic forms, and why ethnicity has become such a significant “category of practice.”Footnote 20 As the post-election violence of 2008 made all too clear, that question has lost none of its urgency since the 1960s.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF FAILURE?
In November 1944, the provincial commissioner of Kenya's Coast Province received a letter announcing the creation of the “Miji Kenda Union”: “Please receive this letter informing you that we people of the nine tribes of the coast … have the intention of uniting our tribes and bringing back the KINSHIP which existed in the time of our forefathers, and creating a party of unity, in order to advance our nation through consultation, mutual affection and assistance in every way.”Footnote 21 All of the authors were men, waged employees living in the coastal town of Mombasa or the colonial capital of Nairobi. They evoked the newly voguish colonial aim of development in support of their plans: “You must be aware of the rottenness and weakness of the development of these people, always being behind; it is because of being divided into small groups, and not agreeing in consultations.”
The provincial commissioner made no objection, and in a first flush of enthusiasm, the new Union organized a grand meeting in Rabai, a few miles inland from Mombasa, attended by men described as representatives of all the “nine tribes”: Digo, Duruma, and Giriama, the three most populous groups, and the smaller groups of Rabai, Ribe, Kambe, Jibana, Chonyi, and Kauma.Footnote 22 But by the end of the 1940s, the Union had almost collapsed, undermined by a combination of poor management, official hostility, and embezzlement. In the decades that followed it never achieved a sustained institutional existence, although a range of groups and individuals appropriated the name “Mijikenda Union” at different times. In 1980 it was formally dissolved, as an incidental byproduct of the antipathy of independent Kenya's second president, Daniel arap Moi, for another explicitly ethnic union, the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association (GEMA). All such associations were required to dissolve on the grounds that all Kenyans should be committed solely to a broader vision of national identity.Footnote 23
This seems a poor record, and the Mijikenda Union has been seen in previous scholarship as no more than a brief stage on the route to nationalist politics.Footnote 24 But despite its organizational failings, the Union had a lasting impact. In 1944, the term Mijikenda was an innovation. As the provincial commissioner's correspondents admitted, the “nine tribes” whom they sought to represent had previously been more often regarded as several separate groups, or—when they were given any collective identity at all—were “better known by the term Wanyika,” a mildly pejorative term which implied that their proper place was in the “wilderness,” inland from the coastal settlements.Footnote 25 Twenty years later, the term Mijikenda had become entirely naturalized into the language of Kenya's ethnic politics, and was widely accepted as denoting a group whose members had a shared sense of identity and interests.
TRADITION AND AUTHORITY IN THE LATE COLONIAL STATE
The men who first used the term Mijikenda as an ethnonym did so in ways that reflected their profoundly colonial experience—conjuring the Union through letters, a constitution, and minutes of a meeting. But they also drew imaginatively on “tradition,” both in the sense of shared practice and through the powerful contrast between the worlds of tradition and colonial government.
A myth of origin through a shared migration from a northern homeland called Singwaya had come to link all of the nine tribes. This story, told by other coastal groups in the nineteenth century, seems to have become widely (though not universally) known amongst the nine tribes from the early twentieth century.Footnote 26 Multiple circumstances contributed to the adoption of this story. There is a considerable linguistic continuum among this population, and though this can be categorized into discrete languages, the linguistic boundaries are hazy and there is substantial inter-comprehensibility. There is a long history of intermarriage and migration that has spread words, names, and practices, creating complex patterns of linguistic and cultural similarity and difference that are not easily mapped onto any single ethnic schema. Movements by individuals and families have also expanded the area occupied by this population over time, especially to the north of Mombasa.Footnote 27 There, the mid-nineteenth-century concentration of population had been along and west of a chain of hills some 15 miles inland of the coast, stretching up to Kilifi. Subsequently, there was a steady and significant movement of population northwards as well as eastwards towards the shoreline.Footnote 28 This migration became mixed up with the widespread absorption into these communities of former slaves and their descendants, who fled from coastal plantations in the nineteenth century or left them in the wake of slavery's abolition in 1907.Footnote 29 There also was, and remains across this population, many similar notions of moral authority, notably in the former importance of age-grades and in the continuing role of central ritual spaces known as kayas, though details of the age-grade system seem to have varied, as did the nature of each group's relationship to the kayas.
This is, in short, a population in which individuals are aware of multiple distinctive group identities, but have also been constantly faced with reminders of their commonality. Disputes over bridewealth, inheritance, and other obligations—the inevitable product of such closeness—have encouraged constant debate over morality and customary law. Also debated are the relationships of these to categories of identity, in which both similarity and difference have been rehearsed through arguments over, for example, the relative significance of maternal and paternal ties in relationships of claim and obligation. These were multiple, overlapping, moral ethnicities whose members constantly debated the bounds of the shared assumptions that constituted their social bonds.
The founding document of the Union offered this similarity in language and customs as evidence that the Mijikenda were “one nation from their origin.” It also placed this nation as the victims of dispossession: “…when the Asian and European strangers came, they found these indigenous people.… And these strangers, if they wanted anything or had any issue, they had to discuss this with the elders of the MIJI KENDA … this union had the authority to make or remove any law in their country … because of the avarice which was associated with these foreign tribes, which were not compatible with the people of MIJI KENDA, they caused them to fall out and fight, causing our elders to misunderstand one another, and so it happened that the power and authority of those Mijikenda elders was lost.”Footnote 30
The language and events at the meeting of the Mijikenda Union at Rabai in 1945 played repeatedly on this division between the culture of the indigenes and that of strangers. Opening the meeting, Edward Binns (then in his forties) explained that he and other “youths” who worked in Nairobi had first conceived the Union as a response to their life as migrant workers: “There are not many Nyika youths in Nairobi, but they thought it better to create a party to unite our nine tribes.” For Binns, the cultural gap between indigenes and strangers created opportunities for intermediacy: “It is up to [the elders] to lead us with all that they have which is of benefit and it is up to us youths to bring to them all the good things which we pick up in our education,” he said, adding later, “We must help [chiefs and elders] and show them the modern way with good manners and respect.” The meeting, reportedly attended by a thousand people including chiefs and “elders,” offered a theatrical demonstration of the different possibilities of such intermediacy. Nine elders were selected to represent the nine tribes. They gave their approval to the Union, “if you, our children, will sit with your elders respectful,” but also took the opportunity to explicitly define themselves as the kambi wa Mijikenda, “the initiated elders of the Mijikenda.”Footnote 31 It was a novel claim, cast as tradition, which drew on both existing notions of elderhood and the powerful distinction between education and tradition.
“The youth” of the Mijikenda Union had cause to be anxious about their relationship with elders and with tradition, for their own experience had been very much shaped by colonialism. The shifting cast of officers of the Mijikenda Union in the later 1940s included a number of educated Christian men, the children or grandchildren of freed slaves from southeast Africa who had been settled at missionary stations.Footnote 32 They were outsiders, and marked as such by their lack of local kin and by their education, which gave them privileged access to clerical employment. Binns himself was one of them, and so was William Paul, from whose postal address the first letter to the provincial commissioner had been sent.Footnote 33 There were other kinds of marginality, too. For example, Nimrod Taabu, who also spoke up at the meeting to ask the elders to pursue unity, was a Digo convert to Christianity, a rare thing among a group who were (unlike other putative Mijikenda) overwhelmingly Muslim. He spent much of his life in Nairobi, working as a carpenter, as did John Juma Maneno, another Digo Christian who became a Mijikenda Union official.Footnote 34 If asked their identity, all of these men could lay claim to membership of one or more of the nine tribes, a claim sometimes made on the basis of marriage ties, sometimes simply through residence or friendship. Binns had grown up in Rabai, at the mission station, and had made blood brotherhood with a prominent Giriama family; Nimrod Taabu married a woman from another Mijikenda group, among whom Christianity was more acceptable. But in small communities, where people routinely place one another through a detailed knowledge of kinship and marriage relationships, the ambiguous status of such people was widely known.
These men—and there were no women—may seem rather like the sort of “lonely, bilingual intelligentsia” that elsewhere were nationalists, inducted into a new sense of identity by the experience of government employment, and created as a community by their shared pilgrimages around the nation created by colonialism.Footnote 35 But these Mijikenda Union members were exploring a much more closely circumscribed idea of the nation. Some of their fellow members were also employees, but more local in their experience, and there were Muslims as well as Christians: Said Suleiman, who wrote to the provincial commissioner, was a Muslim dock-worker; Ali bin Salim, another of the “youth” who spoke up at Rabai, and head of the Union's Mombasa Branch, was a headman for Mombasa municipality; and Lewis Simeon worked for the Public Works Department. Many of these men had an insecure hold on the world of money and employment, and the community they imagined was one that affirmed a place in local society and the possibility of retirement to a rural home secured through their ties of kinship and marriage that spanned the sub-groups of what they now called the Mijikenda.
Binns and his fellows referred with confidence to elders and tradition, and the audience echoed these terms with enthusiasm. But the chiefs and elders that crowded the Rabai meeting faced their own uncertainties. Popular memory among these communities recalls a precolonial past in which authority was “gerontocratic,” diffused among the older men of each community through a system of age-sets, the rituals of which revolved around each community's ritual spaces—the forest clearings known as kayas.Footnote 36 This is at least in part idealized rather than historical; there are counter-memories of multiple, competing kayas, and of individuals who claimed a wider power. Also, a practice persists of esoteric power associated with secret societies to which men gain access through purchase of knowledge rather than generational advance.Footnote 37 Not since the 1880s has a complete cohort of men gone through the full rituals of age-set advancement. By 1914, age-grades were remembered only uncertainly, from an ever-more-remote past.Footnote 38 In these circumstances, the colonial state struggled to find local agents. In the three districts of Kilifi, Kwale, and Mombasa into which the southern coast was divided for administrative purposes, officials saw those who they selected as headmen (restyled after 1938 as “chiefs”) as chronically lacking in authority.Footnote 39
If district commissioners were unsure who were the “elders,” so too were many of their subjects. Tensions between young and old men had been generated by the expansion of settlement in previous decades, which had given young men opportunities to challenge or defy their elders. From the end of the nineteenth century these tensions intensified as opportunities grew for wage labor and marketing produce in the town of Mombasa and along on the coast. Though older men complained of the younger generation's indiscipline, they were themselves divided, with individuals frequently in dispute over land, livestock, or bridewealth. Officially recognized “native tribunals” were supposed to settle such conflicts, but they found their decisions undermined or disputed by groups of “elders” that ran alternative courts, sometimes in collusion with chiefs.Footnote 40 Sporadic attempts by the colonial state to clarify control over “customary law” through a revival of age-set rituals for one or more “Wanyika” groups—in 1917–1919, 1924, 1928–1929, and 1939—attracted some enthusiasm, but repeatedly collapsed beneath the weight of the mutual suspicion and personal ambitions of older men themselves.Footnote 41 Many individuals might claim to be elders, but in 1944 it was reported, “The old kambi system has decayed and now hardly exists.” The uncertainty and rivalry over the status of elders, which has been identified in recent scholarship on the Giriama, has a long history.Footnote 42
For at least some of these older men the idea of the Mijikenda offered a new way to address these problems, by deploying the discursive contrast between tradition and modernity to affirm a vision of a wider legitimacy that placed older men at the center of traditional authority, as a new kind of kambi. A variant of the term Mijikenda had first been used in the 1920s precisely in this context of elder men's authority: the “Midzichenda Native Tribunal” was created in 1924 to handle cases under customary law in nine locations in Kwale district—Midzichenda means, literally, “nine settlements.”Footnote 43
The availability of the term Mijikenda set off a vigorous round of political entrepreneurship and claim-making. In the aftermath of the meeting at Rabai, people claiming to represent the Mijikenda Union set to work collecting funds throughout the southern coast, with “clerks” of the Union traveling widely: at one point it was reported that 16,481/- had been collected in one-shilling subscriptions.Footnote 44 The collection coincided with another attempt to revive the initiation of elders and reports that “elders” were again subverting official tribunals by trying to settle cases.Footnote 45 By mid-1947, the initiations had, like previous attempts, come to nothing, as different groups of older men argued over the control and cost of the ceremonies.Footnote 46
Meanwhile, British officials suspected that chiefs were collecting the Mijikenda Union subscription as though it were a tax and that Union members were misrepresenting themselves as a body that could negotiate with the government.Footnote 47 Colonial officials elsewhere in Kenya seem to have tolerated, and even encouraged ethnic unions at this time.Footnote 48 But on the coast their attitude soon turned to outright hostility. In the Rabai area, and a little further inland near Mariakani, development schemes that involved cutting kaya forests were disrupted by young men claiming to work for the Mijikenda Union, and though the effect was limited, it was enough to outrage officials.Footnote 49
Their anger grew when the Union became involved in land issues. When the rest of the East Africa Protectorate had become Kenya Colony in 1921, the “Ten-Mile Strip” that ran along the coast had remained a protectorate, nominally the sovereign territory of the Omani sultan of Zanzibar.Footnote 50 In Kenya Colony there was no freehold title to land, whereas in the Ten-Mile strip the British recognized what they believed to be preexisting freehold land rights. In practice, only those classified as Arabs or Asians were able to secure this recognition, and Africans could own neither leasehold nor freehold.Footnote 51 South of Mombasa, the collective claims to land of the Digo were acknowledged through the provision of tribal reserves in the coastal strip. North of Mombasa, the coastal strip was composed entirely of freeholds in Arab or Asian ownership, leaseholds given more recently to European or Asian farmers, and unallocated “Crown Land.” Many people lived on these lands, sometimes as formal tenants paying rent, but more often as squatters who gave a share of their crops or their labor to landowners but had no clear legal rights or obligations.Footnote 52 Some were former slaves or their descendants, and others were more recent migrants from a little further inland. Whatever their parents and grandparents may have called themselves, by the 1940s many of these people claimed to belong to one of the groups that came to be called Mijikenda.
While some landowners, short of capital, were happy to have such squatters on their land, the squatters had no security of tenure. Disputes over crops, and especially over the ownership of planted trees, were always possible. In the 1930s, the wider colonial obsession with erosion and soil degradation encouraged British officials to view squatting as a problem, since squatters were alleged to use the land in a transient, destructive way.Footnote 53 The result was a prolonged but fitful campaign to evict or at least regulate squatters on private land, and to drive them off of Crown Land into settlement schemes, where tenure and farming practices were controlled.Footnote 54 This did not reduce the number of squatters, but it did produce an insecure and vulnerable group ready to appropriate the name of the Mijikenda Union in pursuit of their claims to land. Officials reacted with predictable irritation: “The action of the temporary committee of the proposed Miji Kenda Union in writing a letter inciting the Wagiriama to turn Arabs off their land makes one regard the Union with suspicion.”Footnote 55
The committee of the Mijikenda Union were chastised by officials, but activists continued to evoke the Union's name: “A Giriama, stating that he was acting on behalf of the Mijikenda Union on the 29th July had a baraza [public meeting] … at which he asserted that all the land in the coastal strip belonged to the African”; men identified as “kaya elders” were alleged to have sent him, though they denied this to the district commissioner.Footnote 56 Infuriated by these challenges, the district commissioner organized public meetings “at which the Agents of the Miji Kenda Union were invited to state to the people to what purpose they had put the money which they have been collecting.”Footnote 57 The next few years saw a prolonged wrangle over control of the funds, involving British officials and various individuals who claimed to be office-holders (denounced by one district commissioner as “a bunch of semi-educated stiffs”). Several thousand shillings were reportedly embezzled and two men were imprisoned, and by 1953 it was reported that the Mijikenda Union “has practically died.”Footnote 58 A version of the Union survived in Nairobi for a few years among a small, and apparently entirely Christian group of government employees, running a small general goods shop and holding regular music and dance events, but this vanished in the mid-1950s when several key members retired and moved back to the coast.Footnote 59
The term Mijikenda itself maintained a precarious discursive existence during these years. A correspondent to the Mombasa Times in 1955 opined that the term was “too long, too artificial, and has already failed”; the only published reaction to this was another letter suggesting that the term Wanyika was perfectly good.Footnote 60 An educated Christian Ribe, writing an account of his “tribe” for publication, preferred to argue that the nine tribes were Swahili, although he somewhat dismissively noted that “these days they call themselves ‘Miji Kenda.’”Footnote 61 But wider memory does record a persistent use of this new ethnonym, which drew Mijikenda identity directly into everyday expressions of the imagined contrast between the worlds of urban and rural, of money and kinship.
For an urban worker who imagined himself as a migrant from the rural area, to die in town was a constant risk, and to be buried there was inconceivable. An urban death was always the cue for a collection of money to transport the corpse back to a rural home for burial. Such collections were made through meetings that brought together any available immediate family members with a shifting cast of more distant kin, in-laws, and prominent community figures whose attendance, and contributions, were recorded in a book. Marriage, migration, and urban solidarity based on linguistic and cultural similarity would ensure that any such collection meeting assembled individuals from several of the nine tribes, and the collection itself came to be known in the 1950s simply as “the Mijikenda” or “the Midzichenda.” “Even today,” one man remarked, “Mijikenda is still collected, it buries, it is not for weddings or education, no, that Mijikenda is given to bury.”Footnote 62
THE POLITICS OF THE TEN-MILE STRIP
In the later 1950s, the term Mijikenda—and the Mijikenda Union—suddenly reappeared in the written record with extraordinary rapidity, driven by the complex and very public politics of the final years of colonial rule. As the end of British rule moved swiftly from distant prospect to imminent reality, debates over identity acquired urgency and venom: in this context the idea of Mijikenda identity, like the term Kalenjin elsewhere in Kenya at this time, offered a resource that many sought to exploit, for it conjured a political constituency, African but distinctively coastal, from a bundle of multiple, overlapping moral ethnicities.Footnote 63 This was an alluring prospect for aspiring politicians, but the term was equally potent in the hands of ordinary men and women who might use it to make claims on leaders or legitimate their demands for land or jobs. And the term also made its way deeper into daily life as it was deployed in moral arguments over rights and relationships with kin or neighbors. Finally, it added a new layer to the ritual repertoire of a population chronically concerned with the challenges of disease, drought, and the malign possibilities of witchcraft.
This period's beginning was marked by the 1955 decision to allow African political organizations at a district level, followed by the creation in 1957 of directly elected African representation on Kenya's Legislative Council. The anomaly of the Ten-Mile Strip shaped the way these politics developed over the years leading up to independence, in 1963, by raising a stark question: when British rule ended, would the Ten-Mile Strip be part of an independent Kenya, or would it be ruled by the Sultan of Zanzibar?Footnote 64 A second, subsidiary, question became equally insistent: if the Ten-Mile Strip were to be part of Kenya, would the coast be allowed a degree of autonomy, to guard against the danger of domination by “up-country” Africans?
The first question turned coastal residents against one another, as they rehearsed and developed ideas of identity that had long been extant but had been hardened by the experience of the sultans' rule in the late nineteenth century and by British administration. Those who defined themselves as Arabs, as descendants of migrants that had come from Oman or elsewhere since the seventeenth century, had enjoyed political and economic privilege.Footnote 65 Uneasily alongside Arab identity lay the idea of “the Swahili,” a usefully ambivalent term that could be used both to assert a relationship to a much more ancient immigration from the Middle East and to claim a status as descendants of coastal indigenes that had intermarried with or assimilated to this immigrant community. Swahili identity had given generations of local migrants, both forced and unforced, the possibility of incorporation into a largely urban, Muslim culture. But it was a possibility rooted in inequality within an explicitly racial and ethnic hierarchy of domination, the assumptions of which were hardened by nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences.Footnote 66 Arabs looked down on Swahili, and Swahili looked down on those they called Wanyika. The use of the term Swahili itself had declined under the force of Arab disdain and colonial skepticism; by the 1940s, many Swahili preferred to describe themselves in Arabic, as members of the Tissia Taifa (“nine tribes”) and Thalatha Taifa (“three tribes”).Footnote 67 For coastal Africans excluded from these Arab or Arabized identities, the possibility that the coast might actually be ruled by Zanzibar was alarming.Footnote 68
The second question, whether the Ten-Mile Strip would have some autonomy from “up-country” Africans, potentially pitted the people of the coast as a whole against the rest of Kenya. In the towns—most notably in Mombasa, by far the largest coastal urban center—men from across Kenya competed for jobs working for the municipality, for the railway, and most of all, on the docks. There, the long campaign by the state and employers to stabilize labor was fought in the context of bitter rivalry over jobs, which had persistent ethnic overtones.Footnote 69 Coastal people feared that when British rule ended then “up-country” people with superior educations and vigorous involvement in Nairobi politics would seize both political power and the best jobs.Footnote 70 This was a local variant of a widespread Kenyan fear of domination by people from central Kenya, an anxiety that politicians encouraged and exploited.Footnote 71 But it was a distinctive variant in that, on the coast, all people from up-country could be resented, not just those from central Kenya. For this reason, coastal politicians who became involved in Kenyan national politics always faced local suspicion.
Starting in 1956, aspirant political leaders sought to mobilize coastal Africans against “aliens.” In Mombasa, the Mombasa African District Union (MADU) urged African unity against the Arabs. Further north, in Kilifi District, the Kilifi African People's Union (KAPU) encouraged squatters to appropriate the crops of trees on landowners' estates, emboldened by a boom in cashew nut prices that added a new economic incentive to an old grievance.Footnote 72 The documentary record of the period does not show whether the term Mijikenda was used in the public meetings that were the central elements of this politics, and “African” seems to have been the more common term: KAPU's constitution pledged it to “promote with energy all the rights of the Africans of Kilifi District.”Footnote 73
British district commissioners did little to hide their dislike of KAPU and MADU leaders, who they described as “clerks” working in Mombasa. They were initially more enthusiastic when, in 1957, on the basis of a very restricted franchise, Ronald Ngala became the African elected member of Legislative Council representing the coast.Footnote 74 Ngala, a Giriama Christian, had in 1949 written a little book about Giriama custom that asserted the group's distinctive history and culture (though it briefly acknowledged that the nine tribes “have joined together with the name ‘Mijikenda’”).Footnote 75 There is no evidence that Ngala was involved in the Mijikenda Union in the 1940s, and he only became active in Mombasa public life in the early 1950s, when he was headmaster of a school and a nominated councilor.Footnote 76 By 1959, he was using the term Mijikenda to assert the right of squatters to take ownership of land in the coastal strip.Footnote 77
Ngala tried to assert primacy among a fractious group of men who had preceded him in KAPU and MADU and were now vying to lead African coastal politics, and in the process he revived the Mijikenda Union.Footnote 78 His initial status as an apparent favorite of the government was not necessarily an electoral advantage, and by late 1958 he was holding public meetings jointly with KAPU, tacitly competing for prominence with that party's established leaders.Footnote 79 In this contest, Ngala turned to an explicitly ethnic political base and to the assertion of tradition, and encouraged the creation in 1957 of the Midzichenda Cooperative Society, which by 1960 had assumed the identity of the Mijikenda Union.Footnote 80
There was an immediate practical advantage to this: political parties were still only permitted to operate at a district level, but as a “welfare” organization, the Mijikenda Union allowed Ngala to organize across three districts.Footnote 81 This was not merely a matter of evading colonial law: the Mijikenda Union was a different kind of organization than KAPU or MADU were. While KAPU and similar parties vied for seats in the institutions of government, using the term “African” to define their claimed constituency and emphasizing development in their rhetoric, the Mijikenda Union put up no candidates for seats. Though it was vigorously engaged in politics, the Union's language was that of tradition. It drew its strength from men who self-consciously presented themselves as elders and insisted that their status rested not on government or education but on their knowledge of the kayas and of tradition.
And yet, the biographies of these men might seem to confound the distinction between tradition and government. Among them was a former government chief, Mwachiti Nyawa, who had been present in that role at the 1945 Rabai meeting. Another, Mwanyanje Vali, had been jailed for embezzling Mijikenda Union funds in 1948. A third, Birya Masha, was a member of the African District Council with first-hand experience of local government.Footnote 82 But these men presented themselves as elders, and the style and language of this revived Mijikenda Union evoked a very local idea of cultural continuity and a primacy that rested on tradition. From the late 1950s, Birya Masha routinely cast himself as one of the “elders of Kaya Giriama” (although, symptomatically, some still deny that he ever was a “real” kaya elder), and he publicly derided those who had abandoned their culture in favor of education: “Those who prided themselves on being educated had a hard time with Birya … he said, you see, these educated people, they are all thieves!”Footnote 83 This vivid discursive evocation of tradition through contrast to modernity led the district commissioner to comment on “the revival of tradition” in this period; Ngala took to wearing a beaded cap given to him by kaya elders, which was widely believed to contain a powerful magic charm.Footnote 84
In late 1961, circumstances provided opportunity for a very public display of the traditional politics of the Mijikenda Union, when the commissioner appointed to enquire into the future of the “Coastal Strip” paid a visit there. By this time Ngala had led a new party, the Coast African People's Union (CAPU)—created from KAPU as the restrictions on party organizations were lifted—into becoming a wider national party called the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). KADU brought together a group of politicians who sought national independence but feared, or claimed that “their people” feared, Kikuyu dominance.Footnote 85 The party organized delegations and memoranda opposing separate independence for the coast, but the most dramatic display was put on by people claiming association with the Mijikenda Union. They organized a boycott of Arab shops, and brought hundreds of men, “dressed in Mijikenda style” and armed with bows and spears, onto Mombasa's streets to stage a mock “funeral” for the idea of an independent coast.Footnote 86 When the commissioner traveled south of Mombasa he was mobbed by cheering crowds chanting “Freedom with Mijikenda.”Footnote 87 Petitions and memoranda used the term Mijikenda to express a claim to autochthony. Ngala himself set the tone: “KADU does not recognize the coastal strip agreement of 1895 we demand immediate abrogation and sovereignty of the whole Coast province reverting to indigenous be [sic] native ie Wamidzichenda”; and “the strip is African soil … the Arabs know very how they first came into contact with Mijikenda as the indigenous owners of the strip.”Footnote 88 Appearing at a rally in Mombasa, wearing “Miji Kenda robes presented to him … as a sign of ‘eldership,’” Ngala wove together autochthony, tradition, and Mijikenda primacy: “The whole of the Coast Province … was occupied by the Miji Kenda. It was their country—even before the Arab immigration.”Footnote 89
Others similarly intertwined the claim to autochthony with an emphasis on traditional authority. “The WAMIJIKENDA are the indigenous owners [of the coast].… The kayas have always been the traditional bodies charged with the task of maintaining law and order.” Memoranda were dispatched to the commissioner, allegedly from groups of rural elders who were almost certainly illiterate, but typed up in English or Swahili and sent in the space of a few days in October. Their number and style suggest a coordinated attempt to link being indigenous with being Mijikenda. So too did the language of the many delegations that made verbal submissions: “The indigenes who are original in this country, who are the Mijikenda…”; “We the people of Mijikenda … do not want foreign rule.”Footnote 90 Some expressed also the view that they “did not want to be ruled by an up-country government.”Footnote 91 Ngala's close ally, Robert Matano, described as the “leader of the Mijikenda Union,” emphasized the point by taking a delegation of “Mijikenda elders” to Zanzibar to challenge the sultan.Footnote 92
At the end of 1961, the commissioner recommended that the coastal strip should become part of Kenya. Political debate rapidly shifted to the terms of that inclusion. Even as the commissioner was gathering evidence, KADU had been developing the idea of a “regional” constitution under which an independent Kenya would see significant powers devolved from the center. KANU was reluctantly forced to agree to this plan, and in 1962 two further commissions visited the coast to delimit electoral constituencies and set the boundaries of the proposed regions.Footnote 93 In May 1963 elections gave KADU a victory at the coast, including control of the new regional assembly, but national defeat at the hands of KANU. Over the next seventeen months, as Kenya moved towards complete independence, KANU steadily chipped away at the regional constitution and at KADU's fragile unity.Footnote 94 Finally, in October 1964, KADU dissolved. Ngala joined KANU and formally abandoned the aim of a distinct status for the coast, ending an extraordinarily intense period of very public politics.
Although KADU and KANU dominate the written record of these dramatic events, the Mijikenda Union continued to hold public meetings throughout the period, sometimes more frequently than KADU did.Footnote 95 The language of the Union continued to foreground tradition: the press announcement of its annual meeting said, “The meeting will be attended by Miji-Kenda elders resident in Mombasa and the Kwale and Kilifi Districts.”Footnote 96 Local activists now used Mijikenda identity to assert their rights against up-country Africans: “We Miji Kenda … do not want any other tribe to mix with us except the ones which we know to be original.” Birya Masha publicly endorsed KADU candidates on behalf of the “elders,” and candidates were also brought to Kaya Fungo to be blessed.Footnote 97 The politics of independence had firmly established Mijikenda in the imagination of government, and following the flurry of activity around the Coastal Strip, Mijikenda was added to the “list of tribal names” used in the 1962 census.Footnote 98 More importantly, this vivid and very public politics had embedded both the term and the idea of a collective Mijikenda identity in wider popular discussions and quotidian practice. In 1962 and 1963, men claiming to represent the Mijikenda Union were involved in issues of pressing popular concern unrelated to national politics—the control of witchcraft, and the performance of rituals to ensure rain—as well as in continuing disputes over squatting and cashew trees.Footnote 99
THE PEOPLE'S GOVERNMENT?
Independent Kenya was on one level a developmentalist state, whose formal institutions, language, and practices were all alien forms inherited from its late colonial forebear. Its rhetoric linked state legitimacy to a familiar bundle of “progress”—education, healthcare, roads, and waged work—but delivery of that bundle was at best erratic. The state could never reward all of its citizens equally with the fruits of independence, and so politicians were required to manage a local politics of patronage, “to deliver the support of their ethnically mobilized constituents and clients.”Footnote 100 While the formal structures of the state were alien, this local politics turned much more readily to a distinctive language of tradition, and to the sometimes-novel ethnic constituencies that it defined.Footnote 101
The foci of political activity shifted abruptly after 1964. In the words of one official, “The role of politicians changed to that of Nation-Building. Instead of holding political meetings many Development barazas [public meetings] were held.”Footnote 102 Through such meetings, addressed by district commissioners and sometimes by local members of parliament, “appeals [were] made to the public to provide better sanitation and adopt better methods of living” and “emphasis [was] put on education, farming and self-help projects.”Footnote 103 These meetings were held at district headquarters on national holidays, and elsewhere as part of tours or official visits by ministers, as when Ngala and Matano, now KANU stalwarts and government ministers, addressed a KANU rally in 1971 and urged their listeners “to mount joint efforts in the field of development endeavor,” or when Kenyatta gave a speech in Malindi “laying emphasis on hard work and change of attitude by the coastal people.”Footnote 104
The written record of these events can suggest an authoritarian state haranguing a sullen populace to “work harder on your farms.”Footnote 105 But as Angelique Haugerud has argued, while only one party was allowed to organize, and the state could be heavy handed, politicians and administrators nonetheless feared the humiliation that a scanty, silent, or even restive crowd could visit on a speaker. Thus the state needed politicians who could display their popularity, and this made meetings unpredictable.Footnote 106 A partly hidden local politics ran alongside and sometimes through these meetings. This politics was given a particular edge at the coast since, though most senior administrators were from up-country, all politicians were locals, who were expected to secure the support of “their” people. These were encounters between government and local community, in which ideas of ethnicity and tradition were evoked to distance the government and to argue over who had the support of the community. Speeches were not always confined to bland exhortations to development, and they could include pointed comments about rivals, or appeals to visiting dignitaries. As Haugerud observed, “Indirect messages float between orators and hearers.”Footnote 107
Alongside the public events there were private meetings with individuals or delegations that sought the patronage of politicians to secure anything from school fees for a child to government financing for a clinic. Politicians themselves sought out individuals or groups who they thought would help secure victory for themselves or their allies in local government or parliamentary elections, or in national elections (held in 1969 and 1974), or who might help turn out appreciative crowds for meetings.
In this politics, both Ngala and Matano utilized the idea of the Mijikenda as a collective group that was rooted in tradition and whose loyalty they undertook to secure in return for guarantees of resources. They evoked this idea to negotiate upwards as they vied with other ministers for jobs and projects, and downwards as they argued to “their people” that they were serving their interests. Each man was nervous of the other, and both colluded to prevent the emergence of other possible leaders.Footnote 108 Crucially, both talked and behaved in ways that affirmed a distinction between the “government,” and a sphere of local legitimacy and authority resting on tradition and embodied in Mijikenda identity. For Ngala, now uneasily in the government, his relationship with elders was central to his claim to be a mediator between the government and the world of tradition: “When Ronald Ngala went to look for votes … Birya Masha had to be there.”Footnote 109
For Matano, too, the Mijikenda Union, which he remained nominal president of until its dissolution, offered a formal way to position himself as the interlocutor between government and tradition, but he struggled to do so. Matano was usually described as being a Duruma, but local people were (and are) always ready to re-categorize him, since his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother are both said to have been former slaves, brought by missionaries to their home on Methodist church land near Mazeras.Footnote 110 The dissolution of KADU came as a severe shock to many coastal people, and in the immediate aftermath Matano's relationship to tradition came under attack.Footnote 111 Within a month, the elders of the Mijikenda Union, including some who had been along on the delegation he led to Zanzibar, were sending a pointed message to Matano: “You, our representative, Mr Matano, we see that you are now very busy, now that you are in the Government and have become a minister,” they declared in announcing that a meeting had elected Birya Masha to be “president” in his place.Footnote 112 Matano ignored this, but Birya Masha and his fellow elders kept up a steady campaign in which they consistently referred to their status as kaya elders to justify their claim to authority over the Mijikenda. They announced that Matano had been ousted because, “It appears that the many concerns of government have meant that he does not have the time or ability to lead the Mijikenda Union, which is a party that makes every child of Kenya remember their traditions … so that the beliefs of our grandfathers and fathers should not be lost.”Footnote 113
These typewritten letters, and the titles the elders used, drew deeply on bureaucratic practice while insisting on the authorizing power of tradition. Birya Masha, they declared, had been “elected” president of the Mijikenda Union, and so “we have given him complete authority over the traditions of the Mijikenda.” The authors described themselves as “chairmen,” and sometimes as “presidents” of the kayas; in one letter they personified themselves as kayas.Footnote 114 David Parkin, conducting anthropological research during those years, encountered what local discourse cast as the “people's government,” a practice of dispute resolution based on elder men's authority.Footnote 115 Such local “courts” were by no means novel, but the idea that they dealt in “Mijikenda” custom was; Birya and his fellows were inserting themselves and the Mijikenda Union into popular notions of customary justice, drawing on their own roles as intermediaries: “[Birya's] work was to go to Kizurini [the office of the district officer] and when he came back from there he went to the kaya … all the time he talked of the DO [district officer], DC [district commissioner], PC [provincial commissioner] and he had letters in his pockets; he could not read but he knew that this [pocket] was for the DC; this one for the DO.”Footnote 116 Parkin may have overstated the institutional strength of the Union at this time, but Birya was successful enough to alarm local administrators, one of whom reported that Birya was “engaging in political agitation, holding of unlawful courts and illegal secret collection of money.”Footnote 117
Administrators' suspicions of Birya were exacerbated by concerns over witchcraft. The point at which esoteric individual knowledge and power over well being turned baleful was uncertain, and so witchcraft was a perennial concern in local communities. The services of “witch finders”—individuals who claimed to be able to identify witches, but were themselves often suspected of witchcraft—were prized, despite the disapproving attitude of colonial and post-colonial officials, who saw them as charlatans who endangered public order. Sometimes these officials simply banned witch finding—in Kwale in 1965, for example.Footnote 118 But Parkin's work has shown how the government and the Mijikenda Union became entangled in a dispute over how to manage witchcraft in 1966 when a new witch finder emerged named Tsuma Washe, better known as Kajiwe. One local administrator disdainfully noted, “Surprisingly, this Witch Finder has a large crowd of followers.” Others sought and failed to enlist the traditional authority of the Mijikenda Union to manage him. This led to the government imprisoning Kajiwe, and was part of a deepening of administrative hostility toward the Mijikenda Union, as Birya Masha and his fellows made increasingly strident claims to an authority based on tradition and beyond the control of the state.Footnote 119 “The ritual of the traditional oath of the Mijikenda,” they insisted, could end witchcraft; the Mijikenda Union had authorized “indigenous ritual experts” who would eradicate witchcraft if only the government would allow them to do so.Footnote 120 Birya and his allies offered the idea of a Mijikenda collective ritual identity as the answer to other problems, too, as when urban workers in Mombasa raised funds for Birya to use in a collective “Mijikenda” ritual to bring rain.Footnote 121
Birya and his allies used the Mijikenda Union to raise another chronic concern of a populace that suspected that their political leaders had abandoned them to join “the government.” Independence had brought no resolution of the land conflicts at the coast: “Until now you will find that the coast is full of squatters; you were born here, your grandfather, the grandfather of your grandfather … but you are told that you are a squatter.”Footnote 122 From 1964, these squatters increasingly faced African landowners who were buying up government land, or estates that had belonged to Europeans or Arabs. Some were from up-country, while a few were coastal members of the new political elite. Ngala and Matano were too cautious to speak out publicly against this, but Birya Masha roundly denounced the eviction of squatters in the name of the Mijikenda Union.Footnote 123
Matano fought back, insisting that he controlled the Mijikenda Union and ordering local administrators to prevent Birya and his allies from holding meetings.Footnote 124 After Ngala's death in a car crash in 1972, Matano, hoping to ensure his own status as a political leader, rushed to convene a meeting that confirmed his presidency of the Union.Footnote 125 But through the rest of the 1970s, the Union's significance remained imaginary rather than institutional, torn between multiple claimants to the role of intermediary. Though its name was constantly evoked, it had no sustained organizational existence.
CONCLUSION
The dissolution of the Mijikenda Union in 1980 had little meaning, since there was really no institution to abolish. But the idea of a Mijikenda identity had become embedded in multiple areas of discourse and practice. It was evoked by politicians to define a constituency, and by elders who sought to create a moral community over which they had influence. But it was also employed by urban workers who saw the Union as both a tool for political mobilization in their complex battles over civic office in Mombasa, and a means to assert their continued commitment to a rural moral community through a collective offering for rain. Squatters, too, drew upon it as legitimation of their land claims. For all of these different actors, the idea of a Mijikenda identity offered a way to claim an intermediate position between tradition and modernity, by asserting the central importance of a categorical distinction that was both imaginary and powerful.
This super-tribe was not the creation of either colonial officials or missionaries, and it drew much of its creative and dynamic force from continuity; that is, it did not entirely remake culture, or people's sense of themselves. In this way, it reveals the “limits of invention.” But it was also a “modern product of the African encounter with capitalism and the nation state.”Footnote 126 The processes involved could be dramatic, as they were in the debates over the Ten-Mile Strip in October 1961, but more often they were incremental. The idea of the Mijikenda grew out of colonial and post-colonial experience as, consistently and innovatively, those who experimented with it built on the powerfully productive set of contrasts that set modernity against tradition.
