One big tribe

As a child to Ugandan political exiles in Kenya in the eighties, when Uganda in the eyes of Kenyans was synonymous with, political violence, guns and AIDS, it was imperative to hide your true identity, so children in such families like ours grew up professing the loyalty pledge in which “we pledged our loyalty to the president and the republic of Kenya,” oblivious of our Ugandan identity. We fell in love with Kenya, while our parents were busy disguising us and forgot to teach us about our true origins. Fortunately for me, my family was one of the eighteen sub- tribes of the Luyha so we could comfortably melt into the Kenyan Luyha community. Kenya itself was a tribal melting pot which exploded every time an election was around the corner. Beyond that people did not inherently hate each other. Tribes intermarried, worked together and migrated to areas of different tribes. Among the Kikuyu, my parents and I have had best friends for many years devoid of tribal inclinations just as among the Luyha. As soon as you moved to a new community, the initial “what tribe are you” questions prevailed. It lasted long enough before the individual characters defined individual relationships and friendships. When my parents thought it was time to for me to return to Uganda, for my secondary education, surprisingly my supposed country mates, including my tribe mates treated me as foreign. I struggled to fit in, and was quick to adapt local mannerisms in an attempt to fight my inclination towards ‘everything Kenyan is good’ mentality. In the process I adopted ill-mannered stereotypes that were running through the Ugandan society then, treating people of Rwanda origin differently. In the struggle to be Ugandan, I adopted the same behavior that I had strongly abhorred among my Kenyan friends when it was targeted at me. I joined the then popular bandwagon of spewing political garbage, refereeing to any tribe from western Uganda as “Rwandese.” It felt good to fit in until one day, during my university years when a close friend of mine was furious because, I did not know the tribe of my very good friend of six years and was more so infuriated when I said, “does it matter anyway?” My good friend turned out to be a Luo from Northern Uganda. At Makerere University the political spectrum was steeply dived between people originating from western Uganda and Rwanda and rest of the country. The first group was thought to be pro-government but like any university establishment, it was almost impossible for a pro-government student leadership to prevail in university politics. The second group was also dived between the Baganda and the non-Baganda. This was because the Baganda historically had a bone to crush with each of the governments that were led by the Luo. Students carried on such historical perspectives from their parent’s generations. But more importantly others looked down at the Baganda’s obsession with their kingdom and their passionate pursuit of real political power for their unelected, hereditary king over Buganda, now a widely cosmopolitan area of Uganda. After a few years, I found myself in chums with Luo even through I was Bantu (Samia). It surprised me because when I was younger (and still Kenyan!) the few times that I engaged in tribal mind games, I had always sympathized with the Luyha and Kikuyu against the Luo. In a way this tendency to have Luo friends awakened something in me that was almost similar to the feeling I had whenever I managed to slide into another Kenyan tribe when I was younger. It was the realisation that I was not necessarily indisposed to befriend a certain tribe especially when existing biases did not apply. Yet with time I continued to berate my Baganda colleagues for being “unserious” to want to prop up a traditional monarchy in the 21st century which to me was a recession into the past instead of progression into the future. That struggle between the past and future is still alive today in Uganda. Recently a small altercation of the proposed visit to a small quiet town called Kayunga elicited a tough response from government, the usual venomous reaction from other tribes towards Baganda and a series of violent riots which left scores dead. This time, I surprised myself with my detachment from the usual anti-Buganda and pro-Buganda argument. I could only imagine my country Uganda, going alight on Al Jazeera for reasons that to anyone else in the world would seem flimsy. After two years in Rwanda, it is refreshing to live in a country where tribes do not exist. Despite Rwanda’s sad history, it gives me a lot of comfort to know that ordinary Rwandans refer to all Ugandans and sometimes to all Kenyans as one big national tribe. I wish in our ignorance, Kenyans and Ugandans would treat each other like one big tribe, a bit like the Tanzanians. With hindsight, knowing that all my life I never really lived in a community in which my own Samia were predominant, I realize that most prejudicial tribal behavior in Kenya or Uganda or any where for that matter is perhaps due to environmental factors rather than inborn sectarian tendencies. Tribalism is not necessarily inherent. The negative consequences of tribalism can be mitigated by providing a stop gap that will ensure that such habits are not propagated from one generation to another. kelviod@yahoo.com