The Kenyan census and the future

So the census results are finally out, a year after the fact and just in time for the immense amount of planning needed to affect the devolution envisaged under the new Constitution.

The debate and discomfort that the census has evoked is worthy of comment. The initial results were, apparently, ready well in advance of their eventual release. But, at the higher political levels, two issues reportedly provoked much discussion. First, the figures pertaining to the Gikuyu. And second, the figures pertaining to Kenyans of Somali descent - the latter of which, as has since been reported on ad nauseum, had apparently spiked beyond credible bounds.


With the populist result in relation to the Gikuyu, all manner of admonition, conjecture and speculation is still going on in the popular media. The admonitions being to the effect that procreation (within the tribe) is now a ‘duty’. And the conjecture and speculation being to the effect (outside of the tribe) that Gikuyu women are somehow rather more wanton (to put it politely) than others. A more sober and technical result, in relation to Somalis, is the ongoing attempt to document the largely unregistered urban refugee population. All other ‘alien’ registration processes are, in fact, currently on hold - the priority being the Somalis.


Both the discussions and their consequences are, of course, disturbing, reeking of chauvinism both sexist and xenophobic. 


But they are not new discussions. In anticipation of this, one effort prior to the census urged Kenyans not to respond to the questions on ethnicity and race, but to instead insist on being counted as ‘Kenyans’ only. It would be interesting to know just how many Kenyans responded to that particular call to arms in defense of a collective identity.


Other Kenyans, of mixed ethnicity and/or race, had their own particular grievance. They wanted the right to name themselves in their entirety - rather than, as is expected and the common practice, in alignment with just the ethnicity and/or race of their fathers. Needless to say, that wasn’t an option.

The question is, beyond interest, why the figures are important. Because Kenya’s official planning process is obviously not on the basis of ethnicity and/or race - it is on the basis of geographical units. It is true that ethnicity is assumed to be synonymous with geography. But that assumption is (and has increasingly been) an erroneous one to make. Again, our complex history of migration and settlement, forced and otherwise, means that no geographic unit is ethnically homogeneous.


All manner of people are everywhere. I’ve met Somali traders in western province - whose families have been there for generations, their fluency in Bukusu testifying to that fact. It was in western province too that I was first informed that ‘my’ people, the Gikuyu, are called the ‘pumpkin people’. Why? Because ‘we’ apparently, like pumpkin plants, sprawl out everywhere. I laughed.


But we continue to deny the heterogeneous nature of all our geographies. We continue to pretend that we can sweep that complex history of migration and settlement under the carpet. We cannot. The census results - and the reactions to them - are our pointer that we need to resolve our past, while looking firmly forward.

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* Muthoni Wanyeki is executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission.
* This article was first published by The East African.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.