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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Guest Contributor

    Kenya’s Ethnic Land Strife

    January 8, 2008 By Colin Kahl
    A story in yesterday’s New York Times describes an expanding campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kikuyu tribe in western Kenya. We’ve seen this story before. In my 2006 book States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, I explained how rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and historical land grievances collided with multi-party elections in the early 1990s to provide opportunities for Kenyan elites to gain power and wealth by violently mobilizing ethnic groups against one another. The ensuing violence pitted the Kalenjin and other smaller tribal communities engaged in pastoral activities against the Kikuyu, Luo, and other traditional farming communities in the fertile Rift Valley, leaving more than a thousand Kenyans dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

    Sound familiar? Demographically and environmentally induced ethnic land competition—at the heart of the 1990s conflicts—remains problematic today. Deep-seated grievances emanating from struggles over scarce farmland provide ample opportunities for elites across the political spectrum to mobilize tribal supporters to engage in violence and ethnic land cleansing during times of electoral instability—especially in rural areas, where strong group identification facilitates such mobilization. This didn’t happen during the last presidential election, in 2002, because elites bought into the democratic process and the elections were viewed as fair. In addition, the Kenyan Electoral Commission and the international community, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the strife in 1992 and 1997, closely scrutinized electoral behavior in 2002.

    This time, the apparent rigging of the election by the Kibaki regime—which many minority tribes view as having used its political power to unfairly benefit its own Kikuyu tribe—unleashed the latent grievances against the Kikuyu still present in Kenyan society. “You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, told the Times. “They are political…they go back to land.”

    Colin Kahl is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a regular ECSP contributor.
    Topics: Africa, agriculture, conflict, demography, Guest Contributor, livelihoods
    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/05039054403375638428 Richard Cincotta

      Heaping Kenya’s present strife back onto ethnic land grievances is a “real stretch”, Colin. Much of the violence is occurring in Nairobi slums and west-Kenya city suburbs among people who have long ago lost access to cropland. If land was the primary grievance country-wide, why should Luos attack Kikuyus in the sprawling slums of Mathare Valley? — do Luos really want their neighbor’s pieced-together mabati roof and a half-dozen sukuma-wiki plants in the ditch by the outhouse? I don’t think so. I would argue that maintaining high levels of democracy in a country with chronically deep ethnic divisions, a large youth bulge (more than half of all Kenya’s adults are aged 15 to 29), and very few job prospects is risky business. Instead, I would argue that under such conditions, and in a contentious ethnically charged election, it was not very difficult to mobilize violence — and somebody did.

    • http://thelimitingfactor.blogspot.com The Limiting Factor

      If you read his post, you would notice that he never asserted that land grievances caused conflict nation wide by themselves.

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