Asking whether or not the census should continue to count ethnic groups is one way into the difficult conversation about how to reckon with the legacies of colonial weaponisation of ethnicity.<\/p>\n
By Samantha Balaton-Chrimes<\/p>\n
It was a hot and dusty day in January 2019. Sam had been driving me around Nairobi since my first visit, ten years earlier. I often float ideas past him as we endure interminable traffic. \u201cSam, how many tribes are there in Kenya?\u201d I knew there was no definitive answer but I wanted to know his thoughts. \u201cWell, now we are . . . is it . . . 46? Or 47? We used to be 42 but some new ones were recently added. Makondes. Asians. Who else was it? Nubians . . .\u201d \u201cAnd where is the list?\u201d I probed. \u201cOh that one . . . is it gazetted somewhere? I don\u2019t know.\u201d Later that day, while he refined my left hook, I asked my boxing trainer. Embarrassed, he laughed and said \u201cYou know . . . I\u2019ve not brushed up on my tribes lately . . .\u201d \u201cJust roughly . . . how many?\u201d He replied after some thought, \u201cI think . . . well . . . I know that we used to be . . . is it 41? Or 42? 42. We used to be 42. But now, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
In multiple interviews with various government officials I was repeatedly told there were 42+ tribes, but nobody could tell me the nature or location of the list. \u201cDo you know?\u201d one official asked me. Ten years earlier, I had asked members of the minority Nubian community too: \u201cForty-two tribes. And we will be the 43rd.\u201d They even had a letter from a Minister declaring they would, indeed, be counted as such in the 2009 census. But I struggled to find the list. Who is on it? Does it even exist? And if so, who controls it, and how? Why does nobody know? And does it matter?<\/p>\n
In my research, this idea of \u201cthe 42\u201d kept coming up over and over again. I have been conducting academic research in Kenya since 2009, mostly with the minority Nubian community which has long sought recognition as Kenyan, and has had considerable success in recent years in getting it. It was my first interviews with Nubian elders in 2009 that made me start wondering about this idea of \u201cthe 42\u201d, where it comes from, why it matters.<\/p>\n