Kenya: the essential stop
Why Kenya was the stop every traveler recommended — and whether they were right.
(photo albums: Nairobi and safari in Amboseli)
Kenya was perhaps the most inevitable country on this trip. In planning mode a year ago, my friends and I debated how to decide where to go. Start with Africa or Asia? Squeeze in South America or save it? Prioritize big economies (China) or interesting cultures (India) or amazing sights (South Africa) or the most unknown (Middle East)? Focus on meeting new people or visiting expats? Disconnect from work completely, or try to be productive on the road? Follow established routes or make our own way?
No matter what the answers, Kenya and Nairobi would have been part of this trip. Safari is the most unique trip I’ve ever done. Nairobi’s tech scene is famous — home to many expats, fascinating companies, and controversial education work. There are famous beach hostels and the coast and traditional tribes inland. It’s safe but challenging, especially with upcoming elections putting the tension between tribalism and nationalism back in the spotlight. For better worse it’s a symbol of Africa to the western world, and was a place I had to visit.
In fact I had been there before, which makes it the first repeat country on this trip. My family went on Safari and toured Nairobi in 2007. Ignorant at the time of the world outside my upcoming start of college, I had no sense of the upcoming Kenyan elections. Reading accounts from the time, it seems my own ignorance wasn’t the only reason I didn’t sense anything strange — most people took for granted that Kenya was now a peaceful, if flawed, democracy. That was shattered when tribal fighting erupted in the wake of a clearly stolen election. 1300 were dead, 600,000 displaced, the image of Kenya shattered, and a new set of questions emerged.
This visit I tried to prepare a bit better. The best book I read in anticipation was Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat (not available in Kenya). Kenya is composed of a few dozen tribes within 3 ethnic groups. Without getting into the history, the main thing to understand is that in Kenya, historically, your tribe is your identity. It dictates the language you speak at home, the traditions you practice and the values you hold. It is to the tribe that you have loyalty. And tribes are as much in competition within Kenya as they are in cooperation.
This is how the country’s politics have operated too, according to Wrong and others I talked to there. If Kikuyu are in power, Kikuyu companies get business and Kikuyu people get government jobs and Kikuyu regions get infrastructure projects. In the US we have the same “problem” but it’s on the margins — “nepotism” and “kickbacks” and “pork barrel” spending. In Kenya, that’s just how everything is. So Kikuyu families — the whole tribe — thrive with education and prosperity and access; they gain more power and also feel more gratitude and obligation towards the tribe and the cycle repeats.
This attitude extends not just to politics but attitudes in life. Petty corruption — officers stopping your car for a small bribe — is not seen as blatantly immoral. It’s the way he supports his extended family. It’s expected, part of life. There is less effort to control things according to strict rules, which means people don’t expect life to conform to expectations. An expat friend I stayed with sells stovetops and travels with local colleagues to talk to families and tribal leaders. He would go crazy with frustration at the illogical problems and arguments he heard at times; his coworkers shook them off, understanding and empathizing with a life and attitude formed from different expectations and values.
Tribal loyalties are not unequivocal bad. For a country as poor as Kenya, relatively few people starve. Those in power support dozens of extended family members in the tribe. They watch out for their own. Sure, it hurts the country as a whole. The US does things that hurt other countries too, and we’re fine with that. We’ve chosen our tribe (in many cases) to be as “Americans”. They’ve just chosen (passively) to draw their tribal borders not around the nation but around, well, tribes.
Most in Kenya do agree this is not a productive system for the country long-term. Nobody wants the tribal violence of 2007, or such unfairness in the operating government. So there are moves to improve and lots of focus on this election cycle. Will there be a repeat of riots and violence, an endless cycle that surface changes hide every few years to make sure the international aid money keeps flowing? Or is this time different?
In 2010, in response to 2007, the government passed a new constitution referred to as devolution: decentralizing power into the regions rather than concentrating it with the national government. This made national elections a bit less monopolizing over jobs and funding and power. Now each region has more power itself, and since the regions map relatively well to the primary tribes, this should give each tribe more power and make the competition for national control a bit lower stakes and more reliably peaceful.
Six months before the elections though (during primaries), there are reasons for worry. Conflict in the north, unrest and some riots in the west…Though less powerful, the national government still has a lot of influence that comes with it. And emotional responses may not be tied to power alone, but historical frustration and other emotions like pride and shame that come with having your tribe in leadership. Frustrations could still boil over. Of course regions don’t match tribes 1:1 either, so even at the local level there could be more conflict.
However, there are reasons for real optimism. As a journalist friend put it:
It may be good that there is conflict now during the primaries. For the first time, politics are moving beyond pure tribalism. People are getting upset in elections between members of the same tribe — that means they are getting upset about issues and stances, not just identity.
That would mean they are inching closer to a national-oriented democracy — people debating and driving a unified country based on issues that matter to them, not competition between internal groups.
It’s unclear to me how — if — that would play out more broadly: in Kenya, the tribal attitude isn’t just about organizing political life, it plays into everything. Will this change? Should it?
I asked a lot of people in Kenya if experience there — politics, corruption, and otherwise — has changed their view of how things should work. If their perception of fairness and politics and institutions have shifted. This is a group of thoughtful and particularly open people, but still all expats. “No” they almost unanimously said. A fair, logical, corruption-free system still seems right. Maybe even more important given the issues they see in Kenya. But they all followed up to add a more nuanced view, of which the most common theme was this: maybe things don’t work as they ‘should’ in Kenya, and some systems may be objectively better. But you can completely understand how others arise and are maintained. You can understand — and not judge — an alternate morality: it’s not about corruption and power plays here, it’s about watching out for your (extended) family in any way you can.
If you know me, at some point I’ve probably told you to read The Righteous Mind. The book changed my life in a way I didn’t know was possible, shaping my thinking dramatically for the months that followed. At the peak of my obsession with becoming more understanding of other moralities and questioning my own, a friend told me in exasperation “Dan, you’re taking this too far. You’re approaching moral relativism.” He was right and I knew it immediately. But I initially found it hard to balance my new goal of appreciating other value systems as valid and maintaining a set of guiding principles that I truly believed in.
I’ve wrestled with that contradiction on this trip, and in the end it’s not actually all that hard to square. I can understand other views without endorsing them, appreciate their hidden merits without forgetting the drawbacks. You can — should — question your beliefs and seek to appreciate contrary ones; but that doesn’t mean you have to perpetually disregard any views as invalid or give up trying to prioritize them. Better to hold your views as hypotheses rather than truth, and also better to have hypotheses rather than endless open-ended questions.
Kenya wasn’t the place where this reconciliation took place, but it is where they took most concrete form. In Nairobi I met with a local guy, about my age, who I met as a fellow reader of Slate Star Codex. We talked about many of the issues above. Whereas I felt I was a bit late to this philisophical party, following a well-worn path towards more mature views that many of my friends are on too, he did not. He felt he had nobody around him that would relate to the questions he was asking himself. He had tried, and just a very few others were trying to drive Kenya towards a thoughtful reckoning of the changes taking place.
Kenya is unconsciously reckoning with these questions on a national level, with consequences on both sides. If they move towards more ‘fairness’ and individualism, they lose parts of their history and their identity and their culture, and people who are supported by ‘unfair’ policies now will suffer. That doesn’t make progress wrong, but it’s not a pure black and white right either. Recognizing that can help us consider and truly understand both sides, so hopefully we can do a better job anticipating problems and mitigating negatives. In Kenya maybe that would have stopped the outbursts of 2007, in the US perhaps it would have changed the election in 2016.
Originally published on Medium/Zig Zag Zuck.