Clash of clans

Aside from migration to the city, age and middle-class aspirations, though, the two have little in common. In the particulars of their lives, their perceptions and—especially now in the violent aftermath of a disputed presidential election—their politics, Chwanya and Mathu remain separated by one of the most volatile and enduring features of Kenyan society: tribalism.

“I am at a disadvantage because I’m Luo,” said Chwanya, a supporter of opposition leader Raila Odinga, a Luo who has accused President Mwai Kibaki of stealing the December 27 election.

That sentiment mystifies Mathu. He is a member of the Kikuyu, the president’s tribe and the nation’s largest. Although the Kikuyus have dominated Kenyan politics and commerce for more than 40 years, Mathu, like many Kikuyus, has never considered that an advantage. “We are all treated equally,” he said.

Tribe in Kenya is a matter of culture and tradition, a designation—often invisible to the casual observer—that defines social networks and political power. Kibaki claimed victory in the elections despite early returns showing a large lead for Odinga and his party.

Though the Kikuyu and Luo have different ethnic roots, they are indistinguishable physically—so much so that during recent election violence, rioting gangs often asked Kenyans for their national identity cards. It is possible to identify a person’s tribe by his or her name.

As a boy, though, Chwanya said his Kikuyu neighbours didn’t seem any better or worse off than his family. He grew up in an area of western Kenya known as Luoland and had Kikuyu neighbours.

It was during his college years in Nairobi that Chwanya began to see himself as different from his Kikuyu friends, he said. He noticed that they received loans and scholarships but he never did. Though he excelled in his studies and earned a marketing degree, he began looking for a job at the beginning of the Kibaki years and found that Kikuyu-managed firms tended to hire their own. He was finally hired by a British relief organization and went to work in Sudan.

When he came back to Kenya, he applied for public service jobs but was turned down so many times that he came to believe that only a Kikuyu could work for the government. He finally managed to land a job selling office products. In the office, most of the employees were Kikuyu and cliquish, often speaking to one another in the Kikuyu language, Chwanya said.

He headed back to Luoland, where he worked as a taxi driver. Roaming around the towns and villages there, he saw things differently than he had as a boy. He noticed that the roads in his homeland were worse than in the Kikuyu areas where he had worked as a salesman. His parents’ homes did not have running water. There were few jobs and he returned to Nairobi.

As Chwanya’s frustration grew over the years, Samuel Mathu was feeling increasingly optimistic about his future, especially after Kibaki became president in 2002.

It was around then that he decided to leave his small farm in the town of Kipipiri, in the Kikuyu heartland of central Kenya, and start a business in Nairobi. He found a handful of Kikuyu investors and set off for the city. “A lot of people from my place were here,” Mathu said, explaining why he landed in Kangeme. “So they told me what to do.”

He started out selling imported secondhand clothes, a business dominated by a tightly knit Kikuyu network. Mathu got into the more lucrative electronics business when a Kikuyu friend, also from his home town, offered him a deal to take over his small shop in the market.

“A lot of people, these tribes, they do not know how to do business,” Mathu said. “They rely on being employed somewhere. The Kikuyu, they know how to do business.”

In the two days after the election, exit poll numbers suggested that Odinga was headed for a decisive victory. But when Kibaki was declared the winner, Chwanya said to himself, “This thing is going to be done over our dead bodies,” he recalled. Meanwhile, Mathu and his Kikuyu friends were taking to the streets of Kangeme to celebrate. Within about 15 minutes, however, they were being stoned by rioters in the first wave of the violence that eventually swept across Kenya, leaving more than 500 people dead. Even now, his leg gashed by a stone, Mathu said he does not fully understand why his customers and neighbours turned against him. “All these things that came, I don’t know what I can say,” he said. “I don’t know what I can say.”