Kenyan demographers seem blind to the politics of identity and belonging. Yet the codification and recognition of tribe or ethnicity in Kenya has evolved into an exercise that gives \u2013 or denies \u2013 people political and social visibility.<\/p>\n
By Dalle Abraham<\/p>\n
The broken promise<\/p>\n
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) shared pictures of Shona women dressed in immaculately white dresses, deliberately invoking a religious sensibility. This was necessary since the Shona had arrived in Kenya as African missionaries in the 1950s. These pictures were taken at a podium draped in the Kenyan national flag on the occasion of what KHRC referred to on Twitter as the #ShonaCitezenshipPrayer. At the back of the dais was a canvas poster with the words \u201cPrayer for the government of Kenya to grant the Shona citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n
When they moved labourers from one part of their empire to another, the British didn\u2019t think of the kind of long-term damage they left behind among translocated communities like the Warundi (sisal farmers in Kwale), the Makonde (rescued slaves resettled in Kilifi), the Shona (African missionaries), the Nubians (King\u2019s African Rifles who helped the British expand their empire) and the Pemba from Zanzibar. Or the Indians who were brought to work on the Uganda Railway. The post-colonial governments in Kenya, while instrumentalising ethnicity, had not evolved any mechanism to incorporate this translocated population who have over the past 57 years hovered in the margins of the Kenyan state.<\/p>\n
Whether affected by the British Empire or rejected by the post- independence regimes, Kenya has been notorious for locking entire communities from accessing services and crucial papers through elaborate exclusionary mechanisms like censuses and ethnic coding.<\/p>\n