Unit 1.2:
Who is a Kenyan?

Handout

Scenario 1:

Scenario 2: ‘54 million was spent on the search for Kenya’s national dress. The search took place over a period of seven months. The final garments were launched on 14 September 2004. The government participated in the national dress search through the Ministry of Culture and Social Services. The design of the national dress is on a template and can be replicated by all local designers, tailors and manufacturers…’


The questions:

Background Information

Crossroads: A history of migrations

Kenya is home to more than 70 ethnic groups of different origins but with a long history of interaction. Most were already here when the colonialists arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century. In pre-colonial times, these ethnic groups all had historical connections to groups outside present-day Kenya – because they all arrived here in successive waves of migration dating back to perhaps the end of the last Ice Age and certainly to 4,000 years ago. Even the earliest groups thought to have inhabited East Africa after the end of the last Ice Age, the various hunter-gatherers, probably had links with the Khoi San who once ranged all over Southern Africa, as well as with the pygmy Twa peoples of Central Africa. The Rift Valley, the ‘Cradle of Man’, has ever since been a crossroads of sorts: a way-station for the great Bantu expansion and the final destination for many smaller ones. Later mini-migrations spurred by population pressures and internal conflicts among settled groups took place within the region.

Richard Leakey argued that the complex ‘matrix of ecologies’ around the Rift may have been an important factor in speeding up the evolution of the precursors to early man into human beings. It also certainly played a role in the fact that so many micro-nations, each with its own culture, language, ancestral heritage and territory, managed over the centuries to find a niche here.

From around 2,500 BC cattle herding groups were moving slowly from the Ethiopian Highlands into northern, central and eastern Kenya. Subsequently, other groups began moving in up the Nile from North Africa. Soon after 1,000 BC, the Bantu expansion from West Africa, driven by an economic package of agriculture and livestock, emerged from the rainforest of Central Africa into the Rift Valley and Great Lakes area. By this time, there was already what one historian has called ‘a melting pot of Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan farmers and herders growing millet and sorghum and raising livestock in drier areas.’ Bringing with them wet-climate crops developed in their ancestral homelands in Cameroon, the Bantu were able to farm in wet areas in the highlands and, by the last centuries BC, the coast. In East Africa, the Bantu acquired iron and were apparently able to smelt steel in village furnaces 2,000 years before the Bessemer furnaces of 19th century Europe and America. Armed with metal tools and weapons, the Bantu expansion turned unstoppably southward and within a few centuries had reached the east coast of South Africa.

The relations among the different groups in the Rift were marked by occasional raiding but were most of the time relations of trade and intermarriage. The farmer-pastoralists in the hilly areas and the pastoralists in the savannah complemented each other in many ways. During droughts, especially, pastoralist communities exchanged livestock for grains from the agriculturalists, and sometimes destitute neighbours were taken in by more fortunate societies. Bruce Berman, in his book The Dialectic of Domination, writes, “To the sedentary pastoralists on its hilly peripheries, Maasailand represented a vast savings bank of livestock to be drawn on either by trade or, in times of pastoral disaster, by the offer of protection.”

 

The pre-colonial peoples of Kenya

There were two types of state systems in pre-colonial Kenya: centralised and non-centralised. In centralised state systems, power and administrative responsibilities were vested in an executive head and his retinue of advisors or ‘cabinet.’ – for example, the Wanga Kingdom of western Kenya, ruled by the Nabongo. Mumia was the last Nabongo. Such centralised states generally had fairly clearly defined territories. Members of the royal family inherited the position of the king, queen or chief as dictated by tradition. Among the Bantu, both women and men could be heads of the ethnic group. The king or queen often ruled through consultation with a council of elders.  A standing army of warriors was also in place.
 
In the non-centralised state systems, political, administrative and judicial authority was vested in councils of elders. Decision-making was thus made through consultations and discussions among the elders before decisions on public issues were reached. Personal wealth and accomplishment, social status and general contribution to society, determined individuals’ membership in the council of elders.

The ethnic groups making up the black African population represented in Kenya fall under four main language divisions:

 

 

Meanwhile, from perhaps as long ago as the fourth millennium BC, the East African coast had been part of a seaborne trade that by the 7th century AD, with the advent of Islam, began to flourish spectacularly, thanks to the trade winds, or monsoon. One arm of the monsoon sweeps down the eastern seaboard of Africa, blowing six months one way and then reversing direction. The other arm blows down the Arabian Sea all the way to India. Coast-hugging Arab dhows exploited the monsoons to set up a trading network that linked East Africa and Egypt to India. This, in turn became part of a longer trade route linking Europe (from the days of the Roman Empire) to China.

The Arab traders and seafarers who conducted the trade intermarried with local people to settle a chain of port towns all the way from Mogadishu to Mozambique. These are the Muslim peoples who came to be known as the waSwahili and bequeathed East and Central Africa with their lingua franca, kiSwahili. There is a possibility that the Indonesian seafarers who settled Madagascar around 300 AD stopped off at the East African coast and introduced Asian rice, bananas and yams, which by the 14th century had spread across the continent right up to West Africa.

The coastal trade brought with it textiles, beads, carpets and silk from Persia; gems, gold and silver ornaments from India; porcelain from China; and a host of other manufactured commodities and cultural influences from the East and Arabia – while the traders appear to have been interested mainly in spices, perfume, turtle shell, ivory and slaves in East Africa, and agricultural produce and gold farther south.

The Portuguese takeover of the East African coast from the 16th-17th centuries was followed by the rise of Zanzibar as a major trading centre, and the slave trade intensified as some of the demand for slaves in America spilled over from the trans-Atlantic trade from West Africa.

In 1840, Sayyid Said, the Sultan of Oman, moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in order to establish firmer control of his East African empire. Sayyid Said and his successor sons established control over a 10-mile coastal strip (Mwambao), which included the coast of Kenya. The strip stretched from the mouth of the Ravuma River (in what is now Tanzania) to the mouth of the Tana River and extended inland for ten nautical miles from the high water mark. 

For a century and more, Arab-Swahili caravans ventured regularly into the interior in search of ivory and slaves – who were acquired by purchase as much as by raiding. By mid-19th century, up to 20,000 slaves were being ‘extracted’ from East Africa every year, with many more dying on forced marches to the coast and in the hellish conditions on board slave ships. British pressure on the Sultans of Zanzibar – who were valuable allies guarding the southern sea route to India – gradually led to the outlawing of the slave trade, but it was not to end fully until the colonisation of the interior.

At the end of the century, a series of ecological disasters – cattle plagues (rinderpest), smallpox and drought, which together wiped out a quarter of the population of Central Kenya – preceded the coming of the British and the Indians. The colonial era had begun.

Colonialism: Settlers, Indians and the money economy

 

Towards the end of the 19th century, Europe had begun the Scramble for Africa, including the east coast and the headwaters of the Nile.  This led the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 to set out the rules for claiming territories to reduce friction and the possibility of war amongst the European powers – and ultimately the declaration by Britain of the East African Protectorate. The Sultan of Zanzibar’s sovereignty over the ten-mile coastal strip was confirmed in a treaty between Britain and Germany in 1886.

The first Europeans who came to Kenya were explorers – ‘discoverers’ – traders and missionaries who introduced Christianity in the interior. They were followed by the colonisers. To the British, the land that became Kenya was important because it provided access to Uganda. Uganda was of strategic importance because it was the source of the River Nile and therefore regarded as key to Britain retaining control of Egypt and the Suez Canal. The British first established control in Kenya through the Imperial British East Africa (IBEA) Company. The company became bankrupt within seven years and the British government declared direct rule over its zone of influence, establishing a Protectorate in 1895.

The building of the railway from Mombasa to Uganda saw the arrival of large numbers of labourers, technicians and administrators from British India; some stayed on to trade in the towns, and they were followed by specialised trading communities – the mercantile castes of the subcontinent. There is a generalised misconception that the Indians of East Africa, who came to be called Asians, are all descendants of those who came to work on the railway. But the majority of later Asian immigrants were mercantile communities from the west coast of India. These had, in any case, been trading with the Coast for centuries and were already prominent in Zanzibar.
 
There was organised resistance against colonial rule by the Nandi (1895-1906), Luhyia (1895-1896), Somali (1890-1899), Luo (1897), Gusii (1908) and Giriama (1914-1916). The crushing of these revolts and the ‘pacification’ of the African communities and the establishment of British colonial rule saw white settlers arrive in increasing numbers. The ‘pacification’ had its grisly episodes, as African resistance was often fierce. Wrote Captain Richard Meinertzhagen of the King’s African Rifles (the man who was later to ambush and kill the Nandi Orkoiyot Koitalel arap Samoei), “I have performed a most unpleasant duty today… I gave orders that every living thing [in a Kikuyu village] except children should be killed without mercy… Every soul was either shot or bayoneted…” And Winston Churchill, then in the Colonial Office, commented on a dispatch reporting the killing of 100 Abagusii in 1908, “Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these innocent people on such an enormous scale.” But the fact was that the bloodshed in Kenya, compared with colonial adventures elsewhere in Africa, was not really on an enormous scale at all.

The ‘pacification,’ apart from straightforward military conquest and subjugation, had seen the British make alliances with various groups against others in the struggle for resources, land and cattle, in the wake of the ecological disasters mentioned above. So some communities – generally farmers – gained land at the expense of others – generally pastoralists. Unified political control and the resulting peace in the land also allowed farming communities, particularly the Abagusii, Kikuyu and Giriama, to expand into areas previously left uncultivated as defence buffers. Subsequently, the white settlers took possession of ‘empty land’ abandoned as a consequence of rinderpest or smallpox. The Maasai, in particular, lost a great part of their land. The settlers included many large-scale farmers in the so-called White Highlands – large tracts of land in the Central and Rift Valley regions that were set aside for European settlement.

The forging of the colonial state began with a complete restructuring of local institutions. The colonial administration appointed chiefs for administrative purposes. Chiefs were introduced where they did not already exist.  They were given administrative, judicial and executive powers over the people in their areas. In other words, they had absolute power. However, their areas were the ‘native’ or ‘ethnic’ territories. Over time, each ethnic group was confined to a given territory governed by the colonial state through an appointed chief.

 In places where existing traditional leaders resisted colonial rule, they were deposed, with new individuals appointed in their place. Those who collaborated or co-operated were rewarded and confirmed in their positions. Using divide and rule tactics, the administration played off one ethnic group against another or signed protection treaties with some ethnic groups, thereby cementing the differences between the different groups.

All land in the Protectorate was now vested in the Crown. This made it possible for the colonial administration to take land for the settlers from the local population – a practice known as ‘expropriation of land’ or ‘land alienation’.

The administration of the East African Protectorate was transferred from the Foreign Office in London to the Colonial Office in 1905. The protectorate became the Kenya Colony in 1920. It meant that the settlers were no longer in a foreign land. It also meant that all ethnic groups were subject to colonial rule and lost their political independence.

The colonial authorities established the growing of cash-crops intended for export. A settler capitalist class emerged that forced for itself more rights than the Asians and Africans.  From 1904, Native Reserves were created, which divided Africans along ethnic lines and created room for the white settlers. Freedom of movement was restricted. A kipande (or pass) system was introduced as a mechanism to restrict peoples’ movement.

The colonial state established a government and institutions such as the army, police force and administrative structures. There was also a civil service and a Legislative Council (Legco) for whites only. Africans were not represented in the Legco until the mid-1950s. The Hut Tax of 1902, the Poll Tax of 1910, and later the Graduated Personal Tax, were introduced partly to guarantee the supply of cheap labour from the Native Reserves. Tax revenue was used to improve the physical infrastructure and pay salaries to colonial civil servants.

The introduction of the market, however, allowed many farming communities to adapt their traditional agriculture to production for both the domestic and international market, encouraged by the local administration, for whom peasant production became an important source of revenue. The establishment of large settler estates, meanwhile, led to concerted efforts to coerce Africans into wage employment – the hut and other taxes to force them into the cash economy, recruitment through chiefs and direct labour levies – and to keep those wages low. This meant that while poorer sections of African communities – as well as younger sons looking to save up to start a family and their own farms – went into wage employment, others became relatively prosperous from selling the produce of their farms. In 1912, according to the Secretary for Native Affairs, Nyanza peasants could earn twice as much from sales of their produce as from wage employment, while Kikuyu potato growers could do ‘very much better than that’.

Soon, African farmers were employing wage labour themselves – in that same year of 1812, Kamba cattle-owners were already employing 2,000 Kikuyu workers at wages higher than those on European farms. So at the same time as social classes were forming in African societies, the peasant farmers were already on a collision course with the settlers.

The settlers were at the same time fighting a battle with the Asians over the political shape of the colony – whether it would resemble racially segregated South Africa or the ‘equal subjects of the Empire’ model of the Raj in India – while also trying to keep them out of agriculture. A campaign of vilification was mounted against the insular Asian communities, portraying them as the spreaders of syphilis and other diseases, drunkards and thieves who smelled of spice. This antipathy towards their co-arrivals was neatly explained by two colonial officials of the early 1900s – Deputy Commissioner John Ainsworth, who reported, “… fully 80 per cent of capital and business energy of the country is Indian,” and Commissioner Charles Eliot, who remarked, “The average Englishman… cannot tolerate dark colour combined with an intelligence in any way equal to his own.” Negative stereotypes continue to cling to the community and to be publicly aired every now and then.

These contradictions between peasant producers, African estate labour, white settlers and Asian traders, were sharpened by the increasing political influence of the settlers in the colony – and this shaped its future history. It has been argued that many of the measures taken by what became one of Africa’s most repressive colonial regimes were actually the result of the colonial administration trying to protect Africans from more extreme freelance action by the settlers – whom they could not, however, afford to alienate socially or politically.

It was against this background that African political organisation began in the 1920s with the trade unionist, Harry Thuku. The African nationalists were to receive overt or covert Asian help over the next three decades, culminating in Independence. The Africans’ associations formed from the early 1920s included:

 

The colonial administration banned some of these associations, which were seen to be organising against the colonial administration. It, however, allowed the formation of ‘welfare organisations’ along ethnic lines, their activities restricted to the ethnic territories of their founder members.

 

Mau Mau and the end of colonialism

The First World War in East Africa was notable mainly for the fact that African askaris from German East Africa (Tanganyika), organised into guerrilla bands under the command of Lt-Col Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, inflicted a humiliating defeat on crack British-officered Indian troops in the battle for Tanga. Until 1917, they then fought British, South African and Indian troops under General Jan Smuts of South Africa, without surrendering.

But it was the Second World War that produced a sea change in both African and European attitudes to colonisation: African soldiers who fought in campaigns around the world came back empowered and confident, no longer ready to accept colonial rule passively, as they no longer believed in the invincibility of the colonial power. “During the war, and especially after we had gone over to South East Asia and seen an immense concourse of troops from other countries, the askaris became increasingly conscious of any differences in treatment between themselves and the troops of other countries. They asked why only Europeans were officers in the East African army and why the food scales were different as between white and black soldiers… The first real seeds of African nationalism were sown in the later years of the war, when the African began to question the traditional differences between himself and the white man,” writes Michael Blundell in So Rough a Wind.

Meanwhile, around the world, the defeat of Hitler and fascism produced a new mood of enlightenment, as much among ordinary people in the European colonisers’ home countries as among colonised peoples themselves, in which colonialism was no longer an acceptable arrangement. India became independent in 1947 and immediately set about agitating in the United Nations and other international fora against apartheid in South Africa and for independence for colonised countries in Africa and Asia. In Nairobi, Indian High Commissioner, Apa Pant, arrived with instructions from Prime Minister Nehru to assist the African nationalists in whatever way he could. In 1957, Ghana became the first African colony to gain independence; the winds of change were beginning to blow through Africa. And in the British Government, the seat of imperial power, it was also increasingly seen as a foregone conclusion that the British Empire must pass into history.

But back in Kenya, settler resistance to the realities of change (the extremists among them even dreamed of a chain of white dominions through East Africa linking up with the Rhodesians), and the frustration with racial exclusion from the economy as well as impatience at the slow pace of change among a section of Africans, sparked the Mau Mau War and the Emergency – a period of bitter division and some appalling atrocities. As Blundell says, “The challenge of the panga forced changes in the thinking of many people in Kenya. The extremists, both black and white, remained in entrenched opposition to each other but many realised that co-operation between the races was essential.”

Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi, captured and killed by the British, emerged as a national hero and the lack of extremism among some of his followers is shown by a letter from one of his lieutenants, Brig-Gen Karari Njama, to a Maj Owen Jeoffreys, “We do not hate the white man’s colour, but we cannot tolerate seeing a foreign settler with 50,000 acres of land, most of which only the wild game enjoy, while thousands of Africans are starving in their own country. Nor can we accept the white man to remain as master and the African as servant.”

During the Mau Mau period, the colonial state further divided the Kenyan people along ethnic lines. Intensive tribalisation of African communities therefore took place during this period. But in the 1950s the colonial administration allowed the formation of political parties. Two main parties emerged by 1960. These were the Kenya African National Union (KANU), and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU).

Independence proved remarkably amicable, with founding president Jomo Kenyatta’s famous meeting with white settlers in Nakuru in August 1963. To the tense, angry, fearful people who regarded him as a ‘leader unto darkness and death,’ he said, “We want you to stay and farm well in this country… There is no perfect society anywhere. Whether we are white, brown or black, we are not angels. We are human beings, and as such are bound to make mistakes. But there is a great gift that we can exercise, that is to forgive one another… All of us, white, brown and black, can work together to make this country great.”

Kenya became independent in 1963, with a multiparty political system and a two-chamber legislature — the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Constitution also provided for regional governments and regional assemblies. The post-colonial government began addressing the grievances of the African population through Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 on African Socialism, which outlined development policies aimed at correcting regional imbalances and removing ignorance, poverty and disease.

But many repressive laws remained on the books, especially the Chief’s Act, which was discarded only in 1997 with the Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group (IPPG) pre-election agreements. One provision in this Act, empowering chiefs to prohibit ‘excessive dancing,’ illustrated its roots in a culture of deep distrust of African cultural and economic energy. The multiparty political system lasted a year before KADU was dissolved in 1964 to ‘foster national unity’ and its members joined the ruling party, KANU. The two-chamber legislature merged into a single National Assembly in 1966. In 1965/66 another political party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), was formed, following internal disagreements within the ruling party.

In 1969 the government banned the KPU. From then on and until 1982, although no law was passed preventing other political parties from operating, Kenya had only one political party in practice. In 1982, a law was enacted making KANU the only legal political party. This made Kenya a one-party state. In 1991, Section 2A of the Constitution was repealed, reintroducing a multiparty political system. Since then, several political parties have been formed and have contested national elections in 1992, 1997 and 2002, when KANU lost power and was replaced by the NARC government.

The political entente with the Asians had ended with Kenyatta’s Africanisation drive of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While more secure in their place in the nation than at any time since Independence, both Asian and white communities till today remain relatively inactive in political life. Many other communities, especially the pastoralists and the Coastal people, continue to voice concerns about being marginalised in development and politics, and land tensions, as noted earlier, continue to simmer.

Coming to terms with the past: Justice or revenge?

 

As we said above, it would be useful not only to look at the long history of interaction and working together among Kenya’s various peoples, but also to bring out into the open the historical grievances, real and imagined, that sour the relationships between various groups.

The ultimate question, we said, is whether history can be undone – Can we go back? Or do we go forward and make the best of what history has bequeathed us? We have seen that Kenya is not just a state grouping an ethnic majority with ethnic minorities, but a true melting pot of micro-nations who have arrived and made their homes here over millennia. Even the traditional picture of our multiracial society as comprising black, white and brown people – African, European and Asian, if you want to be polite – is too simplified; apart from the many mixed-race families and their progeny, there are at least six to seven major ‘races’ represented here (unlike Southern Africa, which tends to be dominated by a mixture of Bantu groups). And even within these ‘races’ there are sub-groups with such a wide variety of history, culture and language that you could say Kenya is probably the most multicultural country in Africa.

Since Independence, this multicultural mix has been greatly enriched. Kenya has increasingly become the economic and political hub of the wider region – East Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes, southern Sudan and eastern Congo. A large part of the imports and exports of this hinterland pass through the port of Mombasa; Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport brings in passengers from the Middle and Far East and sends them on again to West and Southern Africa. Most flights between Europe and Southern Africa pass through Nairobi, which is also the headquarters of most of the multinational companies operating in the region as well giant regional companies such as the East African Breweries. Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Indian investors looking to penetrate African markets are establishing a foothold in Kenya first. Its advanced banking sector makes it the financial hub of East Africa, while its large pool of skilled managers, technicians and academics now work all over East, Southern and Central Africa. Political exiles from Somalia, Sudan, Congo, the Great Lakes and even Southern Africa have made their homes in Kenya. The peace processes that ended the civil wars in Somalia and Sudan were hosted by Kenya. The United Nations Environment Programme has its headquarters in Nairobi.

The result of all this is that Kenya, apart from the large number of tourists and business visitors, now has large ‘foreign’ communities of long standing of at least three types: expatriate, international, and ‘other African.’ The first two shade into each other, as people from around the world who come to work here choose to settle down, seduced by the country’s beauty and, yes, its cosmopolitanism character. Formal and informal cultural entertainment events in Nairobi and Mombasa, and the great variety of restaurants, provide evidence of medium to large communities of Sudanese, Ugandans, Tanzanians, Burundians, Rwandans, Ethiopians, Congolese, Seychellois, Madagascans, Zimbabweans and Zambians, South Africans, West Africans, Egyptians and many others. There is a small African American/Caribbean community. From Europe there are expatriates and residents of every nationality, with the Italians prominent in Malindi, Spaniards holding paella eating contests, the Irish celebrating St Patrick’s Day with gusto, the French flying in the Nouveau Beaujolais wine from their home country. From the East there are Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Koreans and Australians. A high-cost school in Nairobi boasts of having 60 nationalities on its student roll. All the major religions are present here.

While, of course, the ‘foreign’ communities do not play a role in the political life of the country, their presence means that many Kenyans have the opportunity to acquaint themselves with many different, fresh points of view and to appreciate the value of diversity. Which brings us back to our own diversity and our capacity to deal with it. As we said before, for Kenya’s black communities to see themselves as Kenyan, they must also learn to see the other communities as equally Kenyan too.

An interesting thing about community relations in Kenya is the prevalence of stereotypes and how people seem to live up to these stereotypes in dealing with each other. Even more interesting is that most of these stereotypes come in positive/negative pairs: If Asians are widely seen as exploiters who are too proud to mix with other communities, they are also seen as sharp, industrious business people who understand the value of mutual support; whites are seen as aloof but also as clever and fair-minded; Kikuyus are perceived to be untrustworthy but also extremely clever entrepreneurs; Luos are regarded as pompous show-offs but also as learned intellectuals; Luhyas are said to be slow and lacking in initiative but also hardworking and loyal; Coastal people are seen as lazy but cultured and speak beautiful Kiswali – and so on and so forth.

Often these stereotypes are used jokingly, as in the constant ethnic banter at most modern workplaces where mixed groups of people work side by side. Moreover, different Kenyan groups now routinely take their leisure together in desegregated clubs and places of entertainment. At a popular swimming pool and watersports complex, you can see European, Asian, African and increasingly, Chinese and Korean people enjoying themselves, mostly in their own groups but perfectly relaxed in each other’s presence. New cultural creations in music and drama are popular across the board – even when, like Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s Unbwogable ‘anthem,’ they are in a language few understand. Sports events also bring out an unabashed Kenyan or African patriotism.

Is it possible that, while inter-ethnic relations in Kenya are far from politically correct, they are in many ways already harmonious in a practical sense? After all, the best way to learn to get along with other people is to work, live and play alongside them – and that is what most of us are increasingly having to do, whether we like it or not.

But sensitive issues remain, such as land and the economic, political and educational privileges historically enjoyed by certain communities. As we said, since the proper sphere for the resolution of many of these issues is politics, care must be taken to avoid politicisation of the discussion. This can be done by emphasising that it is not about finding solutions to these problems but about coming up with a constructive approach to their solution, about understanding clearly the difference between revenge and justice, between justice and pragmatic compromise.

History has few heroes or villains – if one community came and grabbed another’s land, they in turn probably suffered the same fate at someone else’s hands. And most invaders/usurpers ended up contributing something valuable to the mix – the Bantu brought metal tools and advanced farming techniques, the Arabs/Swahili enriched the material culture of the interior and kept it open to revitalising outside influences; the British abolished slavery; the Asians brought not only commercial acumen – which they, unlike Uganda’s expelled Asians, are currently passing on to a new generation of African entrepreneurs – but also a cuisine that has passed into common currency so quietly that many people believe chapattis and samosas are authentic Kenyan food. In any case, land grabbed from communal control cannot be repossessed meaningfully when communal systems of ownership have no legal status left. The way forward is through title deeds and politically negotiated equity in land distribution and use, not ethnic clashes.