Divided by tribe

They grew up in farming villages — Teddy Chwanya in the rolling hills of western Kenya and Samuel Mathu amid the cattle and flower farms of the country's lush central region.

Both men left home to take their chances in the capital Nairobi, settling just a few crowded blocks apart in Kangeme, an enclave of one-room cinder-block homes.

They are in their early 30s now and making ends meet, Chwanya as a salesman for a security firm and Mathu running a busy electronics shop.

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, who is also a Luo and who has accused President Mwai Kibaki of stealing the December 27 election.

“We have been oppressed, and we are tired of it.''

Politics and commerce

That sentiment, shared by many Luos across the country, 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. “The Luos, they are angry with the Kikuyus, and I don't know why.''

Tribe in Kenya is a matter of culture and tradition, a designation that defines social networks and political power and at times serves as the foundation for stereotypes used by politicians to manipulate and divide the electorate.

Of the dozens of tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu and to a lesser degree the Luo and the Kalenjin — the ethnic group of former president Daniel arap Moi, who during his 24 years in office remained allied with the financially powerful Kikuyus — have remained the primary political forces since independence.

Any politician hoping to appear as a statesman deplores tribalism in public, even though Kenyans tend to vote in tribal blocs. In certain circles, it is considered rude to ask someone's tribe because it is not supposed to matter.

Though the Kikuyu and Luo have different ethnic roots, they are virtually 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.

But neither ethnicity nor religion, which does not divide the groups, explains the sharply divergent perceptions that Kikuyus and Luos have of their place in Kenyan society.

Tribe, woven as it is into day-to-day life, is the way many members of each group explain their successes and failures in a country that until the recent elections was considered the most stable in East Africa.

In Mathu's case, tribe is so ubiquitous he hardly notices it.
For Chwanya, it has become the raging undercurrent of a frustrated life.

“Kikuyus and Luos do not read from the same page,'' he said.
It was around 5pm recently when he got off a bus run by a Kikuyu company and made his way through the crowded dirt paths of Kangeme.

He bought vegetables at a Kikuyu-owned stand, walked to his Kikuyu-owned house on Kikuyu-owned land and washed his face with water from a Kikuyu-owned pump.

“The vehicles on the road, theirs. Vegetables in the market, theirs. Plots, theirs,'' he said as he arrived home. “There is only the air we are sharing.''

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 who had been encouraged to settle there by Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu.

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 organisation 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. “The manager was not Kikuyu,'' Chwanya said. “Though he was married to a Kikuyu — so you see how these things work.''

In the office, most of the employees were Kikuyu and cliquish, often speaking to one another in the Kikuyu language, Chwanya said.

He was let go after a year and, with mounting anger and bitterness, gave up on Nairobi. 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.

When Chwanya eventually returned to Nairobi, the only job he could get was with a foreign-owned company selling security systems.

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 pyrethrum 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.

He started out selling imported secondhand clothes, a business dominated by a tightly knit Kikuyu network.

A neighbour from Kipipiri sold him his first supply of clothes, he said, and after a year hawking old merchandise in the mazelike markets of Kangeme, he turned a modest profit.

Mathu got into the electronics business when a Kikuyu friend offered him a deal to take over his small shop in the market.

He now gets all his televisions, radios, DVD players and other electronic items from his hometown buddy, the sort of arrangement that is common in Kangeme, where Kikuyus own most of the shops and houses.

Mathu attributes that fact less to social networking than to hard work and business savvy.

“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.''