Abstract
The ethnic-based violence following Kenya’s 2007 disputed presidential election pushed Kenya close to the brink of civil war. Approximately 300,000 Kenyans were displaced from their homes and an estimated thousand killed (Commission of Inquiry into the Post Election Violence, 2008; Horowitz, 2009). Electoral violence along ethnic lines was not a new phenomenon in Kenya and had marred elections since 1992, when Kenya’s transition to multiparty elections exacerbated ethnic competition, rather than fomenting consolidation. Lynch’s volume aims to enhance our understanding of ethnic political competition in Kenya by examining both the construction and utilization of one Kenyan tribal identity—that of the Kalenjin. The word kalenjin means “I say to you” and was first used in the 1940s to identify a group of loosely related highland Nilotic tribes. Although they are most likely only Kenya’s fifth largest tribal grouping, the Kalenjin have played a central role in Kenyan electoral politics, most notably under Daniel arap Moi—a Kalenjin—and in the 2007 postelection violence. The book’s central argument will be familiar to those acquainted with prospect theory and its focus loss aversion. Lynch argues that, for ethnic elites, although potential gains are often important in the construction and mobilization of ethnic identity, fear of loss plays a much more important role; these elites’ fear, in turn, shapes the behavior of citizens in ways that reflect this fear and creates an unstable political environment with tension between ethnic groups.
Substantively, the six empirical chapters of the book can be divided into three parts, which examine the ethnic construction of Kalenjin identity, the role Kalenjin identity played in a one party regime with a Kalenjin dictator, and how the transition to multiparty politics shaped Kalenjin behavior. Drawing on an impressive range of archival and other primary sources, chapters 1 and 2 examine the confluence of pressure from both elites within the subgroups that compose the Kalenjin and the British colonial administration to unite as one political force. Lynch convincingly demonstrates that ethnic elites played a particularly important and undertheorized role during the late colonial era. These elites’ perceptions about potential political marginalization and the opportunities for recognition of a larger bloc catalyzed Kalenjin identity construction among the masses. The archival data, which point to the role of elites and their fears of marginalization, lead Lynch to explicitly attack political scientists’ use of rational actor assumptions in understanding the emergence of ethnic cleavages.
The second set of empirical chapters—chapters 3 and 4—switches levels of analysis to investigate the most politically important coethnic Kalenjin, former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi. The chapters appraise determinants of Moi’s rise to power as a national political figure and investigate how this rise was shaped by the newly emergent Kalenjin identity. The chapters also examine Moi’s use of ethnicity during his rule. Lynch argues that Moi’s association with the Kalenjin was an important variable in his rise to power. But Moi, Lynch points out, often used ethnicity instrumentally, and Moi’s position among the Kalenjin was not of unwavering backing. Lynch demonstrates the increase in Kalenjin political appointments under Moi was not always viewed favorably by the Kalenjin, who tended to view Moi’s patronage through the lens of their subtribe rather than through the Kalenjin lens.
In these chapters Lynch also challenges political science scholarship’s understanding of the role the single party—KANU—played under Moi. Lynch analyzes the mechanisms through which Moi sought to maintain power and argues that the categorization of Kenya as one party state, where the state and party were fused, rather than simply a one-party system, where they party still serves some legitimate democratic functions, is incorrect. Lynch posits that KANU was not the “the central locus of state power” (p. 118). Although the office of the president controlled power, the party was just one of many tools Moi used to rule the country, including, contra Widner (1992), the increased use of the provincial administration, as well as the security apparatus, private networks of patronage, and ethnic mobilization. If Lynch is correct, she provides material for consideration in the current debates about the role parties play in single-party regimes (Magaloni & Kricheli, 2010).
The third substantive part of the book—chapters 5 and 6—examines Kalenjin behavior during Kenya’s transition to multiparty democracy. President Moi won elections in 1992 and 1997 with strong Kalenjin backing. The candidate of Moi’s party KANU, Uhuru Kenyatta, although he ultimately lost the election, also garnered high levels of support from the Kalenjin in 2002. Again, Lynch argues that Kalenjin support cannot be seen as merely a function of patronage, but as a result of political elites mobilizing and galvanizing a sense of fear among the Kalenjin that they would lose policy-making power if the KANU candidate lost. It follows, for Lynch, who argues against Daniel Posner (2005), that mobilizing along political relevant ethnic lines is not the best strategy to maximize political and economic power. Here, the unexplored counterfactual is that the median Kalenjin could have potentially obtained better outcomes by voting differently; however, information provided by Kalenjin elites about “interpreted pasts, and associated notions of threat, justice, and entitlement” (p. 26) shaped Kalenjin voters’ behavior in ways that ultimately hurt their own interests because it made them irrationally risk averse.
This point raises important questions for policy makers and academics alike. If voting along ethnic boundaries is, on the part of individuals, not in fact a strategy to maximize potential economic and political benefits, but rather a way to hedge losses and attempt to reduce threats, then any attempt to change patterns of tribal voting will have to cope head-on with the issue of fear among constituents. Any such effort would also have to provide ways for parties attempting to implement programmatic platforms to credibly signal that the fears of groups like the Kalenjin would not come to fruition under their leadership. One attempt to deal with some of these fears is the current process of devolution under the new constitution passed in 2010, where political power from the center is devolved to newly created county-level governments in an attempt to mediate the winner-take-all nature of Kenya politics. Hence, tracing the Kalenjin reaction to devolved government would provide an interesting follow-up to Lynch’s study.
The book should appeal to three sets of readers. First, as highlighted in the discussion above, for political scientists interested in ethnicity, the book is theoretically contentious and relies on a host of archival and interview data. Second, for those readers interested in the construction of identity in sub-Saharan Africa, the volume fills an important gap in the literature to date, given the political relevance of the Kalenjin in Kenyan politics. We still know surprisingly little about the political development of many African tribal groups in the 20th century. More of such studies will allow for richer comparisons and enhance the ability of quantitative researchers to code tribes on a wide variety of dimensions, including cohesion, subgroupings, and other important variables. Not only Africanists but also other scholars looking at the construction of politically relevant ethnic identities should take interest in the volume. Although post-Soviet scholars have, in the past two decades, produced substantial work on the creation of national identities and politically relevant ethnic cleavages (see Edgar, 2004, for a good example), little of this work has investigated how Soviet colonial rule in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe led to different outcomes than that of British, French, and Portuguese powers in Africa.
Lynch’s volume, however, suffers from a lack of methodological explanation, which she could have overcome despite the sensitive political environment. In the chapters on the Moi era, reference is made to statements by community leaders or elders from various subtribes, but Lynch makes no attempt to discuss the social and political context from which these elders came, what kind of biases they may have had, and the direction of that bias. In the chapters on multiparty democracy, Lynch describes that certain facts were obtained “[o]n the basis of interviews” (p. 206) or that “little hard evidence was gleaned from interviews” (p. 207); however, the author fails to mention what types of interviews occurred, how they were structured, or even what types of actor were interviewed. The author’s admirable fieldwork could have served to make her case more strongly, if more attention had been paid to methodological detail. The reader would have been better able to judge the quality of the data but, instead, is left to wonder about the interview selection and the potential direction of bias.
The book also pays scant attention to Kenya’s rapid demographic changes. Since independence in 1963, Kenya’s population has quintupled from an estimated 8 million to more than 40 million. Population growth has placed immense pressure on land allocation and contributed to rapid urbanization, which has markedly shifted the ethnic composition of the Rift Valley, where the Kalenjin live. Eldoret, the largest town in traditionally Kalenjin territory, has witnessed large-scale in-migration, particularly of Luos, Luhyas, and Kikuyu. As a result, the Kalenjin are no longer a majority in Eldoret. It would have been interesting for Lynch to explore how some of these larger demographic changes are currently affecting Kalenjin political attitudes and political mobilization.
In sum, I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya has deepened our understanding of the construction of a politically salient Kalenjin identity and of the way it has been employed in a modern Kenya. Moreover, it has provided fuel for continued debates about theories based on rational actor assumptions regarding both the construction and political usage of ethnicity.