Posted Saturday, September 11 2010 at 11:45
As I said here a few weeks ago, I am a Luo by language and culture. But I challenge the Planning minister and his census officials to tell me how otherwise a Luo can be defined. By blood? Of course, not.
For, by blood, I am a Chwezi, Bito, Didinga, Ganda, Kisii, Kuria, Luo, Maasai, Maragoli, Muru, Nandi, Nyoro, Rieny, Soga, Tiriki, Wanga, what-have-you. By blood, then, what am I not?
It is a question I can ask with regard to practically every individual Luo. In his-her veins flows blood that is equally mind-boggling in its composition.
From identical vicissitudes of history, every indigenous Kenyan – especially from the larger ethnic communities – has blood that is similarly complicated.
Only from arrant ignorance of history can anybody tell you that he-she is a “pure” Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Kamba, Luhya, Maasai, Meru, Taita, suchlike.
Mother tongue
If, then, an ethnic community (or “tribe”) can only be defined by culture and the language by which the culture is expressed, why is the Ministry of Planning so keen to impose a “tribe” on me? Dholuo is my mother tongue. Luo traditions (“culture”) are what – if I were a bigot – I would stick my neck out for.
To be sure, “Suba” is my background. And the Abasuba were once Bantu speakers (a convergence of splinter groups from Buganda, Busoga, Buluhya and Rieny – in Tanzania’s Musoma area – upon the islands of Rusinga and Mfang’ano and the southern shores of the Winam Gulf of Nam Lolwe (Lake Victoria).
But that was time that was! “Bantu” itself is just a culturo-linguistic concept. Nobody is a Bantu by blood. That is why, from the fortuities of history, a people can become Bantu, or Nilotic or Hamitic – and back – without willing it.
That is why, if there was once such a (Bantu) language as Kisuba, at best, it is moribund. It has been done to death by a linguistic system – that of the Luo – which is powerfully imperious in its cultural content but also overwhelming by the sheer demographical weight of its practitioners.
We have seen identical processes elsewhere in the world, in which languages – because their cultural content is more virile or their speakers demographically or strategically superior – eventually come to swallow less vital ones. What the Anglo-Saxons have done to the Welsh is typical.
But no census taker would today insist that the Bretons (of north-western France) are not French merely because, once upon a time, they were not consanguine with the Teuto-Germanic Franks and Visigoths.
In a country perpetually held backwards by powerful ethnic contradictions, the first goal of a Planning ministry should be to facilitate the merger of smaller ethnic groups into larger ones – of the kind that the Kikuyu and the Luo have achieved and the Luhya, Kalenjin and Mijikenda are striving towards.
Ethnic communities
Yet our Planning ministry seems to have a fixation with proliferating certain parts of Kenya into smaller and smaller ethnic communities.
What can minister Wycliffe Oparanya achieve by driving a wedge between Jobasuba, on the one hand, and Jokajok, Jokowiny, Jokomolo and Jokawanga?
Circumstantial evidence shows that the answer is political – the same narrow-minded tribal politics which has permanently moored this country to the ground since the colonial regime.
That is what can explain the fact that, in other parts Kenya, there is a vigorous attempt at ethnic mergers.
How can the Suba be a separate tribe from the Luo (when both speak the same language and practise the same culture), whereas the Maragoli, Samia and Bukusu – who cannot understand one another’s languages – are subsumed with other communities as “one tribe”.
The same question can be posed with regard to the Kalenjin.
Somebody appears keen to weed out some groups from the Luo to make the Luo appear numerically inferior to the Kalenjin and the Luhya.
Who is it? And what does he stand to gain by it?
ochiengotani@gmail.com
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